I am usually working on a good half a dozen things at any given time and this means that I usually have a good ten or twenty windows open. My chromium currently has a 134 tabs and this is after I  cleaned up and closed all the tabs I no longer need.

Luckily, working in Linux means that I can spread each stream of work into the various workspaces.

Now GNOME 3 makes things a little more complicated with the dynamic workspaces but I’m learning to use it to my advantage

However, with Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot and GNOME 3, I seem to be running into an issue regularly…If I leave my computer for a while, it doesn’t unlock correctly. The screen remains black and I can’t move the mouse to my second screen and the unlock screen doesn’t show up.

Thinking about it, it seems like there might be two screen savers being started but I shall investigate that tomorrow. I have the same issue at both work and home so it is more likely to be related to Ubuntu + GNOME 3 or something about the way I set things up.

I  usually resolve this by logging into the console and here a neat trick for killing all our processes in one fell swoop.

$ kill -9 -1

Another thing I have been doing a bit more of recently is gaming which involves rebooting in Windows.

Both of the above leaves me with a restarted workspace. Starting up the applications pops them all into the same workspace. Chrome is especially a nightmare. I might have 135 open tabs but they are in about 6 windows spread across four workspaces.

It is annoying to have to distribute these things out each time.

After having done much research, I have not been able to find a clean automated solution.

There are two half solution that I have found however.

The first one is Devil’s Pie and for a graphical interface gdevilspie. According the website for Devil’s Pie, it is “A totally crack-ridden program for freaks and weirdos who want precise control over what windows do when they appear. If you want all XChat windows to be on desktop 3, in the lower-left, at 40% transparency, you can do it.”

Unfortunately, that is exactly what it is. If you pre-determine where you want your windows to be, you can use this very useful application. However, that is not quite what I want. I want the current configuration to be remember. Exactly like how Chromium remembers which tabs are in which order in which windows and their position on the workspace, but for multiple workspaces.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any way to save the current state.

There is however, another tool I found scouring the web.

libwnck-3-dev is what I installed on my Ubuntu box. There are two key commands here

$ wnckprop --list

This will list all the windows across all the workspaces. To get more information on a specific Window,

wnckprop --xid [XID]

The XID is the number returned next to each window from the first command. The post that I  mentioned above has a nifty tool attached that saves the window positions and can also restore them using wnckprop.

However, it saves them based on the Window title. This of course doesn’t work for Chromium or such Windows that changes the title each time you change the tab.

However, if the save is the last command you run and the restore is the first command you run after opening up the windows, it can restore the windows into the correct workspaces.

With the idea of the dynamic workspaces in GNOME 3, you might have to initialise the workspaces first but it is better than spending five minutes after logging in each time re-arranging windows…