Neil Bothwick schreef: > On Wed, 31 Aug 2005 23:58:36 -0400, John Dangler wrote: > > >> I've figured out that if you open apps in one workspace, and then >> switch to another, those apps don't appear, which does give me some >> idea of the mechanics, but I'd like to customize what starts and >> what is available in each one individually... > > > I don't know about GNOME, but in KDE you right click the window's > titlebar and select Advanced -> Special window settings. Here you > can specify how the program opens its windows, including which > desktop (or all of them). > > That is a 'cool KDE feature' that GNOME doesn't have. Gnome =>v2, anyway. Apparently Gnome 1.x (which used sawfish for its WM) did have some capacities in this respect. However, as previously mentioned, GNOME will remember what desktop a program was opened on in the last session, if the session was saved with the program open.
But of course, all programs do not support saving their session state at the close of session (Mozilla, Firefox and T-bird being noticeable among this group), so that won't always help. I can't believe no one has mentioned it, but this function (should you choose to use it) is exactly what devilspie is for. It was designed to attempt to recreate the window-matching properties of Sawfish for other WMs. The prinicple is that devilspie watches (invisibly) for a window opening event, and when one occurs, it compares the properties of that window to the properties of the windows that you have said you want acted upon in the config, and then acts upon the window as you specified in the config. You have a fair amount of flexibility in what qualities of the window you want matched (you could match all gaim windows, or only the ones that have 'MSN' in the title) and you have a wide range of operations you can perform on the specified window (send it to a particular desktop, maximize/minimize./size to a particular size, make sticky/pin on all desktops, set it to a particular location on the desktop, etc). The documentation is decidedly minimal, and it's a good thing to know about 'xprop' to get the properties of application windows in the first place, but the included sample and reference is enough to get started with, and experimentation is not difficult. Certainly it works well and does what it says on the tin, afaics (and I've been using it for some time). However, as someone who has set up many applications to be on specific desktops, I will say that you might find it not as useful as it seems at first glance, depending on how you work. It can be quite distracting to open a program-- let's say a file manager-- because there was a message in a terminal saying 'look at thus and so file', and have the file manager open on a different desktop than the terminal (because normally you want the fm out of your way when you're working with it, but in this case you don't). So such a configuration is somewhat constricting in terms of using many applications. But for applications that aren't used flexibly (like Thunderbird, which I always open on desktop 1, so it's never in my way and I don't mind switching desktops to check my mail while I'm waiting for an emerge to finish), it can be useful. HTH, Holly -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
