[tlug] Gazing up and to the left

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Charles Muller writes:

 > Amazed at this, I asked the good doctor what could be done to remedy 
 > the situation.
 > 
 > He said "man X".

Sensei is a *very* old man.  That hasn't been directly relevant to
this issue since FVWM v0.x was the latest and greatest. :-)

X11 has a set of rules for communicating between processes called the
ICCCM.  In particular, the ICCCM defines the interaction between the
window manager and other clients.  The ICCCM is fairly correctly
implemented by all of the so-called "toolkits": Xt, Qt, and GTK+.
This means that interactions between window managers and clients are
more or less toolkit-independent: a window manager implemented in Xt
can happily manage windows of Qt and GTK+ applications.

The window manager is able to retrieve (in fact, control) the geometry
of all toolkit applications.  So it can keep a database of the
applications and their current windows, and of user preferences.  The
database can be made persistent (ie, stored on disk), but *this* is
very window-manager-specific.  For GNOME-based WMs, I suspect that
gets delegated to the GBarf[1], erm, GConf system.  Dunno about KDE.

So you need to do "man $WM".  On many systems (eg, Debian), you can do
"man x-window-manager", because x-window-manager is a system of
symlinks to a command to invoke a window manager, and its
documentation.  On my Debian system it currently points to fluxbox.
If you don't have such a symlink, you'll have to figure it out for
yourself.

In most cases there should be some documentation about how to maintain
a persistent window configuration for your frequently-used apps.

A related concept is the session manager.  The session manager
protocol is defined separately from the ICCCM for some reason.  It
allows a distinguished client (the session manager) to get a limited
amount of information about how to restart other clients in their
current state.  Obviously, "state" overlaps with "window
configuration".  So on some systems you might need to look at the
session manager.  (In many cases the functions of session manager and
window manager are combined in the same program, though, so it's a
distinction without a difference.)

Sorry I can't be of more help, but that's how you would go about
catching this fish.

Footnotes: 
[1]  So named because the syntax of the database files is a dog's
breakfast.