Automated positioning of windows in GNOME

About

Devilspie is a tool for automated window positioning in GNOME. For excample you can set up rules to resize every window with Firefox in title, or running with the thunderbird binary. You can also move windows to other workspaces, set them sticky ore unsticky, remove them from taskbar, remove the window decoration and much mure.

Installation

If you're lucky, you can find devilspie in your repository or in the your buildservice. Otherwise you have to compile it on yourself. Here you can download the source. For compiling run these commands:

tar -xzvf ./devilspie-0.22.tar.gz
cd devilspie-0.22/
./configure
make
sudo make install


Documantation

You can use the GUI, which you can find at here. To launch the GUI, run these commands:

tar -xjvf gdevilspie-0.31.tar.bz2
cd gdevilspie-0.31/
./gdevilspie

 

Or you can configure in manualy by creating/editing config files. Those files have the extension ds and usually are located at ~/.devilspie.

For example if you want to have thunderbird always at the position 300px from the left, 500px from the top, with a size of 600x400px:

(if
    (and
        (is (application_name) "Thunderbird")
        (or
            (contains (window_name) "Thunderbird")
            (contains (window_name) "Draft:")
        )
    )
    (begin
        (geometry "600x400+300+500")
    )
)

 

A very good documentation can by found at http://foosel.org/linux/devilspie. If you want to have devilspie or some other applications started up automated, set them at System -> Settings -> System -> Sessions.

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