There are things that do not work on Wayland yet

Posted Feb 10, 2025 9:30 UTC (Mon) by geert (subscriber, #98403)
In reply to: There are things that do not work on Wayland yet by mathstuf
Parent article: What’s new in GTK, winter 2025 edition

> The control is somewhat backwards here. *Applications* should not request anything about positioning. *You* request it via configuration of your compositor.

OK, applications should not request it, the user launching the application does. I don't care whether this goes through the application (i.e. the old X11 "--geometry" command line hint that lots of applications still have), or through a third party (e.g. the compositor).

> For example, I tell XMonad[1] to "center float" new dialog windows.

How do I ask the compositor to position a specific window?
My use case is a script that launches a zillion of terminal emulator windows, some running a specific application (e.g. screen /dev/serial/by-id/... or ssh), carefully laid-out on my multi-monitor setup.

Thanks!

There are things that do not work on Wayland yet

Posted Feb 10, 2025 11:32 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> How do I ask the compositor to position a specific window?

Depends on your compositor. GNOME is probably not going to support your use case, but you could get `river` to do it.

> My use case is a script that launches a zillion of terminal emulator windows, some running a specific application (e.g. screen /dev/serial/by-id/... or ssh), carefully laid-out on my multi-monitor setup.

First, I would use `tmux` and its layout controls (still running `screen` because, yes, it is very good at talking to serial devices). If you need to multiplex commands, there is the `synchronize-panes` option to send input to all panes in a window. But if you want to have top-level windows, here's how I would do it in XMonad:

- set the layout for the workspace to Grid (or anything that is suitable for you)
- launch all the windows while it is active (or have rules that put them on that workspace)

With `river`, I would do it largely the same (though s/workspace/tag/). However, I'll note that I am still in the process of migrating to river, so this is just based on my limited understanding of its capabilities, not from experience.