Launching applications from a terminal with specific window size and location

Question

I am running Linux Mint 13, with a KDE 4 desktop manager. I would like to launch applications from a terminal (konsole in my specific case) and setting the exact size of the window and the location of the window. As an example, if I launch Kate and Chromium from a terminal, I want Kate's window the cover the left-half of my screen and I want Chromium to cover the upper-right quarter of my screen.

How can I accomplish this?

ps: I have a 15.6" screen set to a 1920x1080 resolution.

Answer 1

If you don't want to specify the geometry/position during startup, but permanently, simple use Kwin's rule system:

• Launch the desired application
• Right-click on the title-bar or use Alt+F3
• More Actions
• Special Window Settings
• Tab: Window matching
  • Check, whether the values were detected correctly, otherwise use the Detect Windows Properties button to capture the data of the target window
• Tab: "Size & Position"
  • Enable the checkboxes of Position and Size
  • Select, when to apply the Position/Size (Apply Initially, Force, etc.)
  • Set the value for Position and/or Size

You can do way more than just this using the window rules, see also: .

Answer 2

Run xwinifo and click on the window of the application you want to start.

Note down the line at the bottom

-geometry WxH+X+Y

where W, H are the width and Height, X, Y are the coordinates of the start of the window.

Then try starting the application with that as a command arguements e.g. for Konsole:

konsole -geometry WxH+X+Y

It should end up reasonably close to where you want. My Y coordinate was about 22 pixels too low - but it gives you something to work with. Perhaps the header of the application (decoration?) is not counted properly?

Anyway do this for all windows you want. Put into a shell script and you can run that to start them all up. e.g.

#! /bin/sh

konsole -geometry WxH+X+Y &
konsole -geometry WxH+X+Y &
konsole -geometry WxH+X+Y &

Where the exact values for W/H/X/Y are obtained from the wininfo command.