ideas to improve activities/desktop automation

[Pierangelo Terzulli]

hi Thomas,

Actually I'm aware of that option and is the way I use the rules too.

I apologize for the lack of clarity, I should have stated my use cases better.
What I'm trying to achieve basically is to have different rules for
different *instances* of application runs: I usually run chromium
browser with two different profiles, like this:

$ chromium-browser --profile-directory="Personal"
$ chromium-browser --profile-directory="Work"

Now, each chromium-browser launch will set WM_CLASS to
"chromium-browser-chromium" in my case, making both instances
indistinguishable from one another. This is because, in my
understanding, currently there are only X window related rules, and
not per-process rules.

Consider another use case: within dolphin, you open in a new window
different folders: ~user/work and ~/user/music. There's no way,
currently, to tell plasma that each dolphin instance should belong to
different activities/desktops.

Yet another, more general: having different launchers for chromium
(one for each profile) in, say, quicklaunch plasmoid (the
configuration I actually use, to be honest): there still no way for
kwinrules to distinguish the two instances.

Generally, you can't indicate on what particular activity/desktop an
application should run at launch time, you only can have preconfigured
matching rules, and the matching rules are only X window related, not
process related (say, PID, cmd arguments, user, working folder...).

I hope to have clarified it better now.


I'm not sure if this kind of ability should be kwin responsibility at
all, I think is more related to Task Management. KWin should only be
provided some "hints" to where to put a particular window.

What do you think?

2016-07-07 11:31 GMT+02:00 Thomas Pfeiffer <thomas.pfeiffer at kde.org>:
> On 07.07.2016 10:50, Pierangelo Terzulli wrote:
>>
>> hi everyone!
>
> Hi Pierangelo,
>>
>> argument like a path for a file manager or a url for a browser).
>>
>> At the moment (please correct me if wrong) such ability is provided by
>> the kwinrules kcm module, but the criteria it provides are related to
>> X window properties only, no application name can be specified, nor a
>> command argument.
>
> I have to correct you, actually ;) The KWin rules can match to an
> application
> name (in fact that's the only way I use them).
> You just enter the application name in the "Window class (application)"
> field and
> you have a rule for an application.
> Actually the clearer way to define application rules is to click the menu
> icon in the
> application's window (the one with the application's icon) or right-click
> the title bar
> and in the menu choose "More Actions -> Special Application settings". This
> creates
> a KWin rule for the application.
> That means that we do not need a new feature, KWin does what you need
> perfectly
> fine.
> The fact that you were not aware of this possibility (and apparently nobody
> in
> #plasma was able to help you, either) points to a usability problem,
> however.
> I know that Martin considers the KWin rules an advanced feature targeting
> users
> which can figure it out themselves, but now we know there is at least one
> person
> who is advanced enough to want such a feature, but not advanced enough to
> understand its UI. Maybe we should work on its usability, after all...
>
> If you have any ideas for how to make it more clear how to set up rules for
> applications, they're welcome!
>
> Cheers,
> Thomas
>
>>
>> How would you solve such a problem? Is it possible at all with the
>> current technology (X11, wayland, TaskManager)? What changes are
>> required to provide such functionality?
>>
>> Here are some links that have dealt with some aspect of this scenario:
>>
>>
>> http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/46621/what-process-created-this-window-with-no-pid-associated
>>
>>
>> http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5478/what-process-created-this-x11-window
>>
>> https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/resourceproto/resproto.txt
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