“There are literally dozens of window managers that you can use with your favorite desktop environment to get a beautiful and appealing desktop. If you want to fine-tune your window manager, here are two programs that can help you control everything from application window size to pinning an application to all workspaces to fixing a position for your application windows to resizing desktops. One, wmctrl, works with any window managers that adheres to the Extended Window Manager Hints, while Devil’s Pie is a window-matching utility, which means it can configure application windows based on defined rules.”
wmctrl is indeed a very handy tool.
here is an example script with wmctrl:
http://vermaden.go.pl/scripts/wm_minimize.sh
Meh, I quit MS Win 98 because I had to install all kinds of tools and small applications (freeware or illegal, mostly) to get it to do what I wanted. Needed to fix functionality which should’ve been there in the first place. Result was of course bad performance, crashes and a lot of wasted time on configuration and keeping the apps up-to-date.
When trying linux, I found out it already did most of these things in a consistent, stable manner. Me happy. I wouldn’t know why one would want to go back patching basic stuff because he/she didn’t choose a capable windowmanager in the first place 😉
Enough ranting – there is some interesting stuff in there, but its generally rather hard to use it seems. Maybe I should mention KWin does almost all of that stuff by default, and is a whole lot more usable… No messing around in config files, just point and click 😉
There’s a bit of a misconception you got there. wmctrl and its ilk are powertools, for special purposes. The comments to the original article on Linux.com have some interesting examples. There are things that you cannot achieve just from the window manager, no matter how nice it is. These tools handle window hints directly and react to them.
Hmmm, I read them, didn’t see much interesting. I either don’t really understand what they do, or they can do it with KWin 😉
You should have a look at KWin, I can easily imagine KWin can actually do a lot wmcrl and devil’s pie can’t do, while I wonder about the opposite…
Well, can you tell it to detect when a window changes its size and hints and only then apply the fullscreen hint to it? It’s a real life scenario. QEMU starts with a fixed size window that cannot be resized or made fullscreen, but later, after the OS in the VM has booted, you can do that. And if you want that to happen automatically, you can achieve it with some Bash scripting and wmctrl.
BTW, by “fullscreen” I mean a special WM window hint, which makes the window lose decorations, cover the entire screen and drop all the way to the bottom whenever it loses focus. Not fullscreen as in change the video mode and let the application replace the desktop.
Yeah, I was wondering about that one, but I didn’t really understand what you meant. Now it’s much more clear, and I’ve been looking through the settings. I don’t think it’s possible the way it would be with wmctrl, but it might be possible using other methods. Some allow you to ignore requested size so you can force another size from the start. The fullscreen thing itself I love, I have F11 as shortcut for fullscreen for every window – just in the windowmanager.
Tips for wmctrl are nice, but most (all?) of those features you get for free when using KWin. They seem very natural for most KDE users
Yes – KWin it is excellent feature of KDE.
When I started using Gnome I was shocked how it is poor in everything comparing to KDE… But I get used to it:)
Now with devilspie I can manage windows in Gnome just like in KDE (but it is veery difficult comparing to KWin)
So the question comes up why you torture yourself with Gnome 😉
I tried getting devilspie to work with xfce, to keep the windows above the panel and staying that way without me manually doing it to every window every login, to no avail.
Try your beloved KDE on a PII w/ 128M and you’ll see that Kwin doesn’t do much of anything except consume everything is sight much like Roseanne Barr at a buffet. It’s not just a matter of choosing the right desktop it’s also a matter of choosing something that keeps you productive on the hardware you have.
Sure, such a system isn’t fun with KDE. Luckily, most ppl nowadays have a system with 256 mb ram or more – which is enough to run KDE smoothly (see the EEE pc as a good example).