"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."
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Member since:2005-07-07
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...
Member since:2006-06-21
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.
Member since:
2006-06-21
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.