wm-win-tool 0.1.1

Store and restore desktops, geometries and shaded state of selected X11 windows

wm-win-tool

Store desktops, geometries, and shades state of X11 windows, selected by title and class patterns, in order to restore this layout later on.

The primary reason for this program to exist is Firefox, that fails to restore its session properly under usual X11 window managers (KF5 in my case).

Note, that the problem is well known, but unfortunately, little has been done in the last 13 years to solve this issue.

This is an attempt to solve it manually/externally, but might prove useful for other constellations as well.

Usage:

wm-win-tool [-hVvfbr] [-c class][-t title] store
wm-win-tool [-hVvfbr] [-c class][-t title] restore [arg]
wm-win-tool [-hVvb][-c class][-t title] winlist [max]
wm-win-tool [-hVv] storelist [max]
       -h, --help           this message
       -V, --version        print version and exit
       -v, --verbose        verbose mode (cumulative)
       -f, --force          force store
       -b, --bracket        use the bracket pattern
       -r, --regexp         class and title pattern are regexp
       -c, --class class    match window class
       -t, --title title    match window title

class and title are simple case sensitive wildcard pattern by default, that can be supplied multiple times to match a certain subset of windows. The regexp option switches to regular expression matching. Make sure to properly quote such arguments.

Note, that the selection parameters for store and restore should match.

restore will restore the window positions, matched by class or pattern, and arg is either a timestamp from store list, or a relative index (eg. -1 for the latest session store [default], -2 for the second latest...).

The bracket option just matches the part of the window title in square brackets. This is most useful in conjunction with Firefox and the Window Titler addon.

Example Usage

Save Firefox session: install the Window Titler addon and supply all windows with a unique name, that should appear in square brackets in front of the window title.

Now saving a session is as easy as:

wm-win-tool -vb store

You can run this command as many times, as you want. As long as the session wasn't changed, it won't store a new session (or --force option is given).

After reboot, you may wish to restore this session:

wm-win-tool -vb restore

é voila, the windows move to their original desktops, resize, and have their shaded state applied.

The session data is saved in ~/local/share/wm-win-tool.

Install

with pip:

$ pip install wm-win-tool

from source:

$ wget https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/source/w/wm-win-tool/wm-win-tool-0.1.tar.gz
$ tar xvf wm-win-tool-0.1.tar.gz
$ cd wm-win-tool-0.1
$ python3 setup.py install

Dependencies

You need to make sure, that the command line programs wmctrl and xprop are installed. Check with your distributions package manager..

Final notes

The commands store and restore could be implicitly triggered, when executed via symlinks to wm-win-tool, eg:

$ ln -s wm-win-tool wm-win-store
$ ln -s wm-win-tool wm-win-restore

Some things are pretty oldschool, eg. command line handling, but until the command line interface gets significant more complex, I prefer to do it this way.

If you have other ideas, interesting applications, what ever, let me know.

Feedback welcome.