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How I open and resize all my applications with just a keyboard shortcut

Ricardo Borges on July 13, 2020

Every morning I have to open, resize and reposition all applications I need to work, so I thought: What if I only had to press a keyboard shortcut ...

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Thiago Araújo Silva • Jul 15 '20 • Edited

Cool script! On my end, I use devilspie2 to monitor new windows and do whatever I want with them. That along with Gnome's automatic shortcuts for favorite applications (Win+1, Win+2, ..., until Win+9) makes the process lazy for me because I just trigger the shortcut to open the app and its window appears exactly where I want. Here is my configuration file in Lua.

I imagine your script might have a few edge cases to deal with. For instance, I think you should match by WM_CLASS instead of window title. If there's an unrelated window with "google" in its title and it appears before Google Chrome, your script will probably resize the wrong window. For that, you should probably use wmctrl -xl, which will also print out the application's WM_CLASS, and then parse the output.

I even use this trick in my Lua config file to figure out how many Chrome windows are open and only act on the window if it's the first one.

Thomas Wright • Jul 14 '20 • Edited

On the one hand I can see many uses of such a script. On the other hand, I cannot help seeing a shorter alternative article:
"Every morning I have to open, resize and and reposition all applications I need to work, so I thought: What if I used suspend/hibernate?"

This alternative aside, I believe KDE and some other desktop environments have "restore previous session" options although, last time I checked this did not extend to restoring window positions. Perhaps this could make a useful gnome shell extension?

Ricardo Borges • Jul 15 '20

I use dual boot, so suspend mode is not a option for me. I could use hibernate but I have learn more writing my own solution.

Thomas Wright • Jul 15 '20 • Edited

Fair enough; I do see the value of such a tool even if I would not necessarily use it. This is one of the reasons I very rarely boot into windows these days, alongside the hour of Windows updates I incur every time I do so. I also keep too much other state in RAM such as my browser tabs, my tmux session, and my open jupyter notebooks to want to reboot frequently. My applications also tend to be spread over ~8 virtual desktops, which would be interesting to try and restore programmatically.

Patryk Gronkiewicz • Jul 14 '20

Wouldn't it be easier to use tiling window manager rather than regular desktop environment? Most of them support floating windows, so I don't think it's the problem

Sakshat • Jul 14 '20

Exactly what I was thinking. There are some easy to configure tiling window managers like awesome or i3 with a good amount of tutorials for beginners.