Xfce Forum

firstairbender

Member

From: Canada

Registered: 2020-08-28

Posts: 22

Automatically moving windows from external monitor when unplugged

There is a reddit post which asks a similar question to this, but I was wondering if any (seasoned) XFCE users have a solution for it.

In brief, I want to make sure that when I unplug my laptop from my external display, the windows that were previously on the external monitor are all moved to the laptop/primary monitor while maintaining their original states (stacking, size, children, group, etc). For windows that weren't maximized, it should also reposition them relative (or as close as possible) to their original position on the new monitor.

I have searched around the forum, and found a couple posts that seem to address some parts of this issue, but not the full problem:

• https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=7159

• https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=9623

Ideally, this functionality should be handled by xfwm4, but it doesn't seem to be doing that for me.

Is there any solution that exists for XFCE, or for X11 windows in general? I have found devilspie2, which looks quite promising, but it seems to only work to carry out an action on a window when that window is created, not when the monitor for the window is closed.

I would be happy to hear that something like this already exists or is already in the pipeline, otherwise, I am currently tweaking devilspie2 in a private copy to also handle this kind of behavior. I would rather not do that, but if nothing exists, then I guess I have no choice.

Last edited by firstairbender (2020-10-31 21:15:29)