xwinrestore: Remember window positions for different display configurations

xwinrestore remembers and restores X11 window sizes and positions for different display configurations. For example, when you disconnect an external display from your laptop, xwinrestore restores your windows on the laptop's internal display to the positions they had before you last attached the external display.

xwinrestore was inspired by the RestoreWindows program for Microsoft Windows.

As a bonus feature, it also supports optional automatic screen resizing, which is useful with certain combinations of remote desktop viewers and desktop environments. For example, XFCE4 does not auto-resize the screen when a SPICE viewer (virt-viewer) window is resized. Auto-resizing can be enabled with the -P option.

This project is suspended as of 2023, as I have switched to a tiling window manager.

Usage

Prerequisites

xwinrestore requires Python 3.7 or newer, and version 0.24 or newer of the python-xlib package. You can install the latter using your operating system's package management or by running pip install python-xlib (some systems may use pip3).

Note to Ubuntu users: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and earlier ship with version 0.23 of python-xlib, which is not compatible with xwinrestore. Either install a newer version with pip or install the version packaged for a newer distribution.

Your window manager must support at least version 1.1 of the Extended Window Manager Hints specification. xwinrestore has so far only been tested with xfwm4. Your X server must also support the RandR extension version 1.2 or newer.

Installation

Copy xwinrestore.py to a location of your choice, for example /usr/local/bin.

Usage

Run xwinrestore.py in the background on login. You can start it from .xinitrc, .xsession or similar file, or through your desktop environment's autostart facility.

If you need automatic screen resizing, add the -P option. This is currently supported only in single-display configurations and is likely only useful for virtual (remote desktop) displays. The effect should be an automated version of running the command (in the case of virt-viewer) xrandr --output Virtual-1 --auto after window resize.

Run the program with --help to see command line options. If you encounter problems, try running the program manually with -vv to enable debug logging.

Limitations

• Window configurations are stored based on the windows' internal identifiers. In practice, if you quit and relaunch an application, its position cannot be restored. Window matching based on window titles and classes may be implemented in the future.

• Desktop panning has not been tested. Attempting to use xwinrestore with panning enabled is likely to cause problems. Other exotic RandR configurations, such as multi-output CRTCs, may also cause problems.

• Unlikely to work with (X)Wayland now or in the future.

• Actions (position restore, screen resize) are delayed to avoid stepping on the actual window manager's toes. Current settings are rather conservative, but some waiting is probably unavoidable since we must manage windows without being the window manager.

Bug reports and patches

Please use Github issues for bug reports. Patches may be sent as diffs or pull requests. However, code should be kept in a single file to keep installation simple.

Bug reports should include logs. Kill any running instace of xwinrestore, run xwinrestore.py -vv in a terminal and reproduce the problem to capture a debug log.

Links

• wmctrl source was used as a reference for the more arcane EWMH incantations.

• RandR extension documentation is useful for understanding the code. Only a small subset of the RandR conceptual model is supported by xwinrestore.

License

    Copyright 2020 Valtteri Vuorikoski

    This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
    any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with this program.  If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.