Re: Preserved Window Placement

[Jason Simanek <jsimanek gmail com>]

Hi Ross!

On 10/24/2012 01:07 AM, Ross Burton wrote:
> You could try Devil's Pie 2 which has a proper scripting engine at the core, so you could probably write a save/restore script that doesn't need explicit sizing.  You'll then see how hard this is to do properly.

If anybody knows about window placement on Linux, it would be you.

I understand that it's difficult as things stand right now. As a 
non-programmer though, I see applications preserve similar properties 
all the time. Gimp remembers which palettes were open and where you had 
positioned them. Firefox remembers how many tabs I had open and in what 
order they were in. Most applications seem to remember whether or not 
they were maximized previously. But all of these features are part of 
the individual programs (and extensions in Firefox's case).

It seems to me that the position and dimensions of a window in the 
context of a user's desktop (assuming that the dimensions of the desktop 
itself don't change, but even Apple hasn't solved that challenge last I 
checked) could be boiled down to 4 numbers saved as the application is 
closed (width, height, x, y [from top-left corner possibly]).

Is the problem a philosophical one? On the Devil's Pie site you say 
“Metacity is a lean window manager.” So does the challenge of preserved 
window placement come out of a belief that this is not something that 
should be managed by the window manager?

I would think simply preserving the specific absolute position of the 
windows of the various applications a user regularly employs would be 
much easier than calculating a dynamic position on the fly every time a 
new application is launched.

It's just weird that KDE, Gnome and every other Linux desktop doesn't 
seem to even be discussing this topic. Which is baffling in the context 
of all of the recent re-designing of the desktop workflow and interface. 
All of these changes and truly amazing innovation and yet when we launch 
an application the window still appears in an arbitrary location. It's 
baffling.

Is it an issue of the complexity of the problem being too great and the 
interest in solving it being too small?

Thanks for listening. Maybe I can start tinkering with Devil's Pie 2 and 
actually create something useful that other folks can use.

Jason Simanek