Window Placement - sawfish Programming Manual

Sawfish supports multiple ways of placing new windows on the display. There is a “current” placement mode for normal windows, and another mode for transient windows.

— Variable: place-window-mode

A symbol indicating the method of placing normal windows. This defaults to top-left.

— Variable: place-transient-mode

A symbol indicating the method of placing transient windows. This defaults to centered-on-parent.

— Function: placement-mode name

Return the placement mode object corresponding to name.

— Variable: placement-modes

List of names of all placement modes. Sawfish 1.3 ships with the following placement modes:

randomly The new window is placed at a random location on the screen.
interactively Prompt the user to select a position with the mouse. The new window is created such that its top-left corner is at that position.
centered The new window is created at the center of the screen.
centered-on-parent The new window has a parent, it is centered on that parent. If the new window instead has a focused window in the same group, it is centered on that focused window. Otherwise the new window is simply centered.
under-pointer Create the new window so that it's under the pointer, without going off the edge of the screen.
first-fit
best-fit Look for positions where the new window would have a small overlap area with already visible windows. The first-fit algorithm uses the first “good” position found. The best-fit algorithm looks at all possible positions and picks the best of them.
best-fit-group As best-fit, but the new window is only checked for overlap with other windows in its group.
first-fit-or-interactive As first-fit, but if Sawfish cannot find a “good” position, it falls back to interactively mode.
stagger Attempts to place each new window below and to the right of the previous window. See stagger-placement-step.
top-left Interpret the top-left to bottom-right screen diagonal as a series of slots, each of which may have a window. Find the first empty slot and place the window there. Sawfish will shrink the window to prevent it from going past the right or bottom edge, or even beneath a special window like a panel. If Sawfish is not allowed to shrink the window enough to prevent this, it instead places the window randomly.
off-center Tries to put windows in the center of the screen, but in such a way that the newly placed window doesn't fully obscure an existing window.
This is to handle the case where two windows of the same size are created one after the other, so that the user is sure to see (at least part of) both windows.

Make no changes to the window's position. The window remains wherever the X server placed it initially.

In all of these placement modes, the mode is responsible for taking the window object as an argument, and manipulating its position with, e.g., move-window-to.

— Variable: stagger-placement-step

In stagger placement mode, the distance down and to the right from the previously placed window to the new one. This is measured in pixels.

There are two circumstances in which Sawfish will place a window: either the window has just been created, or Sawfish has begun managing the window's display. In the latter case, the window will have the placed property.

— Variable: ignore-program-positions

When t, program position size hints are not considered when placing windows.

“Avoided” windows should be kept unobscured by other windows wherever possible. In particular, first-fit and best-fit methods will attempt to place new windows away from them, and maximized windows will not stretch over them.

— Function: window-avoided-p window

Return t if window should be kept unobscured by other windows wherever possible.

— Function: avoided-windows &optional window

Returns a list of all windows that should be left unobscured where possible. If window is defined, then it defines a window that will be never returned in the list.

— Variable: dont-avoid-ignored

When non-nil, ignored windows aren't avoided by default. Defaults to non-nil.

— Variable: avoid-by-default

When non-nil, any unspecified windows are avoided by default. Defaults to nil.

— Function: define-placement-mode name fun &keywords for-normal for-dialogs

Define a new window placement mode called name (a symbol). The function fun will be called with a single argument when a window should be placed using this mode. The single argument is the window to be placed.
If the for-normal keyword is t, then this placement mode is marked as valid for place-window-mode. The same applies to for-dialogs and place-transient-mode.

14 Window Placement