I may regret looking at this... I vaguely remember there being a profiles thing for Xorg et al, and there is, but it mostly seems to be "per desktop manager" not "per display configuration" the only thing I could see that might help is the capacity to assign hot-keys to arbitrary configuration/commands with openbox... https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/openbox#Launch_a_complex_command_with_h... mind you, it's a loooong time since I bothered with this... On Sun, 22 Jul 2018 at 21:54, Kim Oldfield via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:

Hi,

Does anyone know how I can save (and later restore) the positions of my windows on my screens?

On my laptop I'm running openbox as my window manager on Ubuntu 18.04.

At my desk I have a docking station with 2 external monitors. I've configured keyboard shortcuts in openbox to configure my screens appropriately for docked or undocked configuration (using xrandr).

Whenever I undock all my windows get moved over to fit on the laptop screen - so when I dock the laptop again the windows are in the wrong locations, and I have to manually position them in the appropriate locations for my external monitors.

What I would like is a way to save my window positions before undocking, and then a way to restore these window positions when I dock again later.

Does anyone have a solution or suggestions to help with this problem?

Regards, Kim _______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list luv-main@luv.asn.au https://lists.luv.asn.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/luv-main

-- Dr Paul van den Bergen

tl;dr version: * shell: xdotool or (probably better for your use case) wmctrl * perl: X11::GUITest https://metacpan.org/pod/X11::GUITest * python: emwh http://ewmh.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ewmh.html or xdo https://github.com/rshk/python-libxdo or xlib https://github.com/python-xlib/python-xlib * devilspie2 http://www.nongnu.org/devilspie2/ I didn't know about devilspie2 when I started writing this reply, but it sounds like it's ideal for automating tasks like this. It also seems to be a tool I've been looking for for years. With all of these tools the procedure will be similar but the exact details will differ: for each window you want to move: get its window id change the geometry of that windowid Long, rambling, barely coherent version: On Sun, Jul 22, 2018 at 09:54:25PM +1000, Kim Oldfield wrote:

Does anyone know how I can save (and later restore) the positions of my windows on my screens?

AFAIK, there isn't anything that can do exactly what you want. There are tools you can use in shell scripts and libraries for various programming/scripting languages. to do roughly what you want There's also the sawfish window manager, which is very programmable (with a lisp-like language). You can program it to react to all sorts of events - I used to program it to redefine the window properties of certain always-on-top, un-resizable dialog boxes so that they weren't always-on-top and were re-sizeable (very useful for apps that assume that everyone uses the developer's screen resolution and font size), and to force certain windows to always open at a specific location and size. But I haven't used it for years, not since I switched to openbox and then later to using XFCE. That was so long ago that I think it was still called "sawmill" when I last used it. I can't even remember why I stopped using it. I've been looking for a standalone X event monitor that can be programmed to perform the same kinds of actions for other window managers. Haven't found one. I don't know if it can detect a screen being attached or detached when you dock and undock the laptop. There are also things like xdotool which can send X events like key-strokes or resizes etc to windows. e.g. mupdf doesn't take a --geometry option, so I use the following wrapper script to start mupdf with a window sized to fit an A4 PDF document on my 1440p monitor: #!/bin/bash # run mupdf in the background, then use xdotool to resize it mupdf "$@" & sleep 0.2 # find the window IDs with class "mupdf" MUWIN=( $(xdotool search --class mupdf) ) # resize them and send a "Z" keystroke to them. for w in "${MUWIN[@]}" ; do xdotool windowsize --sync "$w" 1020 1320 xdotool key --window "$w" Z done You could write a script that you run manually when you re-dock your laptop that used xdotool to search for particular windows and move & resize them. BTW, xwininfo is useful for getting exact pixel sizes and locations of current windows. just run it and then click on the window you want info on. alternatively, you can use xdotool to find the window-id of a window and then use 'xdotool getwindowgeometry' on it. From the xdotool man page: getwindowgeometry [options] [window] Output the geometry (location and position) of a window. The values include: x, y, width, height, and screen number. --shell Output values suitable for 'eval' in a shell. Note that window managers tend to treat multiple monitors as one big desktop, so moving a window from one screen to another requires knowing the co-ordinates for the start of the particular screen. e.g. my system has a 28" 2560x1440 main monitor, with an old 21" 1680x1050 monitor to the right of that (and on its side so it's 1050 wide x 1680 high). That means windows on the older 21" monitor are always going to be have an x position >= 2560. e.g. if I maximise a mupdf window on it: $ xdotool search --class mupdf 83886223 $ xdotool getwindowgeometry 83886223 Window 83886223 Position: 2560,35 (screen: 0) Geometry: 1050x1610 The window starts at x=2560, y=35 (remember this is all zero-based so the first screen's horizontal pixels are 0-2559, 2nd screen starts at 2560). The window size (geometry) is 1050x1610 (not the full 1680 because there are xfce panels at top and bottom of the screen). wmctrl is another program with similar capabilities. I use both of them for different tasks - they're both quite capable but some things are easier to do with xdotool, and some are easier to do with wmctrl. Note that both tools will take window and other IDs as either hexadecimal or decimal values. xdotool displays them as decimal, while wmctrl displays them in hex. $ wmctrl -l -p -G -x | grep -i mupdf 0x0500008f 0 0 2560 35 1050 1610 mupdf.MuPDF ganesh debian-reference.en.pdf - 1/302 (96 dpi) to extract the window-id for use in script, use awk: $ wmctrl -l -p -G -x | awk '$8 ~ /mupdf/ {print $1}' 0x0500008f $ xdotool getwindowgeometry 0x0500008f Window 83886223 Position: 2560,35 (screen: 0) Geometry: 1050x1610 Now that I think about it, wmctrl is probably better for your needs here. The "-l" option to list all windows and their geometries will be useful and a lot less hassle than getting each window's geometry individually. You could run 'wmctrl -l -p -G -x' immediately before un-docking, save the output to a file, and then run a script to parse and act on that file after you've re-docked. Note also that perl, python, and other languages have libraries for manipulating window geometries and other attributes. If your script needs to search for and reposition dozens or hundreds of windows, it will be much faster to run and easier to write if you do it using one of these languages than with a shell script repeatedly forking external programs and parsing their output. For perl, X11::GUITest seems quite capable (but I've never used it). It's packaged in debian as libx11-guitest-perl Here's an old perl-monks thread where someone wants to do exactly what you want: https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=803821 This thread mentions a program called devilspie which sounds like it can do the kind of scripted window manipulation that i've been wanting since i stopped using sawfish. I'd heard of this before but it seemed to be abandonware. After some brief googling I found that there's now a devilspie2 by a different developer which last had an updated release in Sep 2017 so seems to be actively maintained. devilspie2 replaces the original program's custom pattern matching language with a LUA interpreter. Both are packaged for debian, and the devilspie2 home page is at http://www.nongnu.org/devilspie2/ You might be able to use devilspie2 to write a script that automatically moves windows for you when your laptop is docked...depends on whether it can detect the addition/removal of a screen or not. worth looking at, anyway. For python, you'd use the ewmh library which will work with any reasonably modern desktop or window manager. Alternatively, python-xdo. Both of these are built-on top of python xlib. All are available packaged for debian for both python2 & python3 python-ewmh-doc - Python interface to EWMH-compliant window managers (common documentation) python-ewmh - Python interface to EWMH-compliant window managers (Python 2) python3-ewmh - Python interface to EWMH-compliant window managers (Python 3) python-xdo - Python 2 library for simulating X11 keyboard/mouse input (libxdo bindings) python3-xdo - Python 3 library for simulating X11 keyboard/mouse input (libxdo bindings) python-xlib - interface for Python to the X11 protocol python3-xlib - interface for Python 3 to the X11 protocol craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>