Remember window placement & size
Submitted by axb..@..il.com
Assigned to Olivier Fourdan @olivier
Description
I'd like to put a bounty of $10.000 for development of a much requested feature so that XFCE's window manager remembers window size & position much like KDE does. Many Linux desktop users would really appreciate it if some other desktop environment would include such a feature.
While a nice try, Smart placement doesn't really cut it.
Dev Team: please contact me directly, off-bugzilla, to confirm I'm not trolling.
Meanwhile, as many others, I'm stuck with KDE and not 100% happy... Axb
Activity
@oliviersaid:So what is it exactly that you're after?
You want xfwm4 to "remember" the size/position of all windows even after they quit so that they get placed at the same location if they ser re-open the apps?
xfwm4 already does that for session management, you want the same mechanism within a session?
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(In reply to Olivier Fourdan from comment 1)
Sorry, design decision in xfce are not open to bribery.
My offer was definitely not intended as bribery. If I could fork/contribute/code the stuff myself I would - As I can't I'm willing to pay for someone to do it. Some projects appreciate "feature sponsoring".
And this bug does not really look like a proper enhancement request, "I want xfce to be like KDE" is not a good description, my answer to this is if you want KDE, use KDE...
I don't want XFCE to look like KDE - it's not about the look.
I'd like XFCE to provid a feature which, afaik, seems unique to KDE and while looking around for an alternative Window Manager to replace KDE's bulk, XFCE seems like the best I looked at.
After using XFCE for a week on a separate machine, XFCE is the big winner in many aspects and the only thing which bugged me was the amount of time I spent moving windows around 2 monitor setups or doing miles of movement on my main 40" 4k display because of the lack of real "placement memory"
thanks for reconsidering your comment
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(In reply to Olivier Fourdan from comment 2)
So what is it exactly that you're after?
You want xfwm4 to "remember" the size/position of all windows even after they quit so that they get placed at the same location if they ser re-open the apps?
xfwm4 already does that for session management, you want the same mechanism within a session?
yes, exactly. between sessions and in same session.
added 5. Window Placement / Position label
added 2. Feature 5. Settings labels
One workaround is that you can use kwin as the WM in Xfce with
kwin --replace.In order to give users more control over the placement of apps, even if the app is saving its location (#303 (closed)), a few options can be added to the window placement tab.
- Add an additional radio button to 'By default, place windows:' labelled 'At the center of the screen, then saved position', which will remember the position and size of apps for when they are next launched.
- Add a three radio button group called 'Placement Management' with entries for 'None', 'Smart', 'Window Manager'. When 'Window Manager' is enabled, all the smart placement elements will be inactive and Xfwm will ignore an app's specified location and places it where Xfwm last saved its location.
It would also be nice to be able to implement a similar feature of Kwin, where a user can specify on a per-app bases through the window menu, what Xfwm should manage, for example its position, size, workspace, etc.
Window Menu
Window Settings
Just to be clear, placing a bounty is the best way to convince me not to do something, because I feel this as a tentative of bribery.
Just FTR, the window manager already saves windows size and position (that's called session management), it's just that it restore them only when the session starts.
Do we want that all the time in xfwm4? No, that'd be overkill, I reckon.
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If I open thunar and then close it, I would like it to open where it was last closed. I wouldn't call that overkill. If apps don't remember positioning, shouldn't the window manager do so?
The notes panel plugin saves the size and position of the notes and even if I remove the plugin and install it again, it still remembers it.
I see a number of issues with this proposal:
- Remembering means basically saving the size and position to a file. That file will tend to grow indefinitely overtime.
- Window matching is fragile, so that feature will not be reliable anyway - A typical example of this is Firefox.
- Some applications already do this, so the window manager would be racing against those apps to restore the window position/location.
But as I said, the code is already there (for session management) if you want to play with that and try by yourself.
mentioned in issue #376 (moved)
