Re: Saving Workspace

["Andrea Vettorello" <andrea vettorello gmail com>]

On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 2:27 AM, Michael B Allen <ioplex gmail com> wrote:
> On 4/6/08, Andrea Vettorello <andrea vettorello gmail com> wrote:
>  > I don't have an opinion in the matter, but I don't use Metacity and
>  >  the last time I've tried I could track the windows positions between
>  >  sessions, but it's a feature that I don't use.
>
>  So what do you use and can it save window state?

Instead of Metacity you can use any EWMH compliant window manager. I'm
still using Sawfish from the time it was the Gnome default WM (when
they switched from Enlightenment).

There's an optional extension (
http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/sawfish/trunk/lisp/sawfish/wm/ext/window-history.jl?revision=4068&view=markup
) that tries to keep track of windows state, so I recalled wrong as it
does more than only saving windows positions.To me it's not as useful
as it seems as applications generally aren't session aware: for
example you'll end up with bunch of terminals with the correct
position in your screen but all using your home dir as the working
dir.

If you ask me, having a notebook with a working sleep mode (suspend to
RAM) is better... ^__^

>  >  The only application I've in my session is GKrellM and it manages the
>  >  position itself... ^__^;
>
>  The problem has to do with multiple instances of the same program. So
>  one xterm works fine. Gnome-terminal is actually a single instance
>  with just multiple windows so that's probably why it works with
>  multiple terminal windows.
>
>  Is there any scripting control over where Windows are positioned?
>  Meaning, can I create a script file that I just run from the
>  commandline once when I login such that I can start an xterm and then
>  tell metacity to position it's window (idenfied by pid I suppose) on a
>  particular desktop at a particular position?

The Xorg "geometry" option, from what I know, works only for the
visible desktop, i.e. it  doesn't have the concept of virtual desktop.

The Metaticy blog post I linked in my previous email mention "Devil's
Pie", an external application that implements the matching
functionality for "broken" applications that's missing in Metacity.

And finally there's "wmctrl" ( http://www.sweb.cz/tripie/utils/wmctrl/
), a command line tool that can interact with an EWMH compliant window
manager (but never used it myself and if the need arise Sawfish has
it's own "client")...


-- 
Andrea