CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxx11xlib
PineForestRanch
PineForestRanch

Reputation: 473

Determining and restoring Window state in Linux

I use xlib. I want to remember window position and restore it to that position the next time it starts. This will help the user as he won't need to move/size the window to the desired position at every start.

It works more or less Ok, except one case. When the window is maximized, I cannot find the way to determine its true (non-maximized) size and position. Perhaps someone knows how to do it?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 584

Answers (1)

Havoc P
Havoc P

Reputation: 8477

There isn't as far as I know a standard way to do this. If you read the source to Metacity for example you can see it keeps this unmaximized size in the MetaWindow object but I don't think it gets stored in a property, and I don't see a property for this in the EWMH or ICCCM specs.

It's possible that some specific window managers might store it in a nonstandard property.

When a window is maximized you could get a property change event with the maximization flag (libwnck is an old library to track this sort of thing, maybe there's a newer one I don't know). However I doubt it's defined whether the resizing happens before or after setting the flag. You could perhaps heuristically assume that a resize covering most of the screen within 1 second of setting the maximize flag was a maximize, or some similar hack.

All that said, I suspect the easiest way to get this feature is to implement it as a window manager extension or plugin, which many WMs support in some way.

There is an old spec for this (X session management protocol) unfortunately the spec is ridiculously broken, unclear and essentially impossible to implement. A core issue that was never addressed - and probably needs app cooperation to address - is how to recognize "the same" window across restarts in order to restore its size. There are only flawed heuristics for that.

(I wrote metacity and worked on a couple session managers long ago so once I could have told you a lot more, but I've forgotten many details.)

Upvotes: 3

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