::[ edam ]:: » How to start an application on a specific workspace

Many X applications allow you to specify geometry, like this:
$ terminator --geometry=200x200+0+0
Which is great. But it doesn’t let you specify what *desktop* you want the application to open on.

For a while, in GNOME 3, I used the [Auto Move Windows](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/16/auto-move-windows/) extension, which moves all windows of a given application to a particular workspace. The limitation with this approach is that it affects *all* windows of a given application and can’t be specified per application launch (which is not so useful for, say, terminals!)

So I wrote a script to do what I wanted. You simply pass the script a desktop (which is a zero-based index) and the command to launch. E.g.:
$ start-on-workspace 1 terminator --geometry=200x200+0+0

Here’s the script. It works by launching the process then polling the X-server for any windows that are owned by that process 10 times a second for 10 seconds. If it finds one, it moves it to the specified workspace.

#!/bin/bash


APP=`basename "$0"`
die()

{

	echo $APP: "$@" >&2

	exit 1

}
usage()

{

	echo 'usage: '$APP' WORKSPACE CMD [ARG]...'

	echo

	echo 'WORKSPACE is the zero-based index of the workspace'

	exit 1

}
# check wmctrl is available

[[ -x `which wmctrl` ]] || die "please install wmctrl"
# we should have at least 2 args

[[ -n "$2" ]] || usage
# check workspace

WS=$1

[[ $(( 0 + $WS )) -gt 0 || "$WS" == "0" ]] || usage

shift
# launch program

"$@" &

CPID=$!

# look for the window every 0.1 seconds for 10 seconds for (( A = 0; A < 100; A++ )); do sleep 0.1 # has child process terminated? [[ -d /proc/$CPID ]] || break # try to find process's window ID WID=`wmctrl -lp | \ egrep '^0x[0-9a-f]+ +[-0-9]+ +'$CPID' ' | \ awk '{print $1}'` if [[ -n "$WID" ]]; then # move the window wmctrl -ir $WID -t $WS break fi done # failed? [[ $A -eq 100 ]] && die "couldn't find application's window..."

3rd September, 2012 — computing — 4 comments