delaying kwin checking for special windows?

[Duncan]

xPol posted on Thu, 17 Jun 2010 06:10:00 +0200 as excerpted:

> I am used to settle windows in their desktops, according to specific
> substring in the window title bar.
> Unfortunately, the mozilla firefox extension that sets custom title bar
> takes time to accomplish its work so kwin cannot arrange windows as i
> would like.
> Any suggestions?

I've run into the same problem at times.  There's a couple techniques I've 
used to work around it, but it'd be useful if kwin eventually got a 
feature that would grab onto existing windows if their titles changed to 
match those speced in the specific window config.  I wonder if there's an 
open bug/request for that?  I've not looked.

The two things I've done to work around it are as follows:

1)  Sometimes, I've had to use "force" rather than "apply initially".
Of course, that has its negatives if you want to configure default window 
behavior, but would still like the flexibility of being able to change it, 
since that's impossible with force (unless you change the config 
temporarily, of course).  But "force" does match when "apply initially" 
won't, exactly because the initial window has a different name, and 
sometimes, losing the flexibility of "apply initially" isn't as much of a 
loss as not being able to apply the properties to that window at all.  So 
it works for some cases, but if I really need the ability to change it 
later, it doesn't.

2)  Use window roles instead of titles, where possible.  If you're not 
matching on title, then whether the window originally appears with it or 
gets changed to it later, doesn't matter, "apply initially" will still 
work, because it's not matching on title.

Unfortunately, not all app developers supply sane or unique values for 
their window roles, if they fill them in at all.  In the one case, I was 
actually working closely enough with "upstream" (on a project I'd rather 
adopted, I'm not a dev, but I can and do help on the mailing lists for 
projects which I adopt, and that's a valuable contribution as well), and 
filling out window role is a simple enough change, that my suggestion to 
do so was quickly adopted, and I could then control the various windows of 
that app separately, regardless of what the title was, because the 
assigned window roles made sense and were unique.  (In that case, I wanted 
to maximize some windows, without maximizing others, without forcing it, 
as I have two monitors, and wanted to be able to spread over both at 
times, so apply initially it needed to be.  I was able to do just that, 
after appropriately descriptive window roles were assigned to the separate 
windows.)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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