A potted account of Ross' life

I am struggling to get devilspie to configure.
While I work on this, I was wondering whether the following issues, present in version 0.4, are still around in 0.7.

(1) Would like to have option of affecting existing windows at time of devilspie's startup.  This was a former behavior from 0.3 that we relied on, that changed in 0.4.

(2) devilspie crashes on some setups when a flurb is programmed to set an application window layer above or below.  The error arises from something in libwnck on solaris. I don't have much more information on this; just reports from frustrated users at remote sites where I can't just sit down and try things out.

(3) Assigning workspaces based on application name is unreliable - it often doesn't work, and so our users use window title fragments instead.  I would like to use any words or fragments from the full process string to reliably assign windows.

(4) Would be nice if we could somehow "Boolean AND" both window
titles and starting process words - would allow finer control
over "which instance" of multiply run apps is intended.  As it is
now, users try doing -xrm "title*resource: uniquestuff" as a
workaround, but that doesn't always work.

(5) Knowing which flavor of regexp is being used would be nice.

(6) Main bug - an application which changes its title bar text can cause a window to "warp" back
to the current workspace.  I would like to control this.  I don't
say it's necessarily a bug.  But MOST of the time, I would like
to stop it.  Examples of applications which do this are netscape 7, sun's mail program, etc.

Related to (6) is a bug I've encountered with Epiphany 1.4. Previously, I've used the application name, not the window title to put Epiphany on a workspace, unfortunately, Epiphany jumps back to the workspace it was originally started on if called again from the command line (epiphany -n '<url>'). This worked fine until Epiphany 1.4 :/. Any chance of a command line devilspie-start ala kstart?

Many thanks for this very useful app. It allowed me to say goodbye to Sawfish (not maintained anymore) and to start with Metacity.
But, you should update the link in Freshmeat because it is not valid.
RB

Hi Ross,

Thanks for the great program.  Is there any plan to support setting window transparencies?  It's now supported in xfce 4.2...
http://lunar-linux.org/pipermail/xfce/2004-October/010822.html

Thanks agian!

I vote for the setting window transparencies along with Mike.  That would rule!

It's kind of annoying having to hit transset everytime I open a new window...Can't be that hard to implement.

How come it doesn't give any output unless started from a terminal? I want to set it to output to a log file so I can check process names etc. but I can't. Either allow this, or set a command-line option for the output file.

Thanks - other than that this is a great piece of software.

Some things I forgot to mention:

Matchers for geometry (with > < etc operators)

The Flash MX (wine) splash screen gets put in the middle of my dual monitor display (so half on each) and it doesnt get an entry in devilspie - anyway I could fix this?

On a side note: Didn't anyone notice how dumb the name libwnck is?

Rodrigo:
* I presume the Flash MX window is an override_redirect window, so nothing else in X knows it exists.  Moan to the WINE people.

* libwnck was created shortly before libsnot...

* What do you mean by matchers for geometry?  All windows greater than a certain size?  Patches accepted...

* It doesn't output to a log file as I've never needed that functionality, no one else has, and no one has mailed me a patch to add it.  Patches accepted.

By matchers for geometry I mean "If any window wants to create itself at x > 1024 (on my second screen), put it at x = 0 (my first screen)"

On the patches front - it's gonna be a few years before I can even think of trying to do that...

I just thought the log file output would be good so you could find out a windows info without having to kill devilspie and start it from a console.