R help - Sep 2005 - Help: x11 position in the Unix environment

Hello,

In the Unix environment, I open a window by x11(). May I specify the
position of this window by specifying the position of the top left of
the window as in Windows environment? Or some other parameters can be
used to do that?

Thank you,
Shengzhe

On Mon, 2005-09-26 at 17:45 +0200, Shengzhe Wu wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> In the Unix environment, I open a window by x11(). May I specify the
> position of this window by specifying the position of the top left of
> the window as in Windows environment? Or some other parameters can be
> used to do that?
> 
> Thank you,
> Shengzhe

I don't believe so. In general, under Unix/Linux, the Window Manager
determines window positioning upon startup unless the application
overrides this behavior. Some applications let you specify application
window positioning via command line 'geometry' arguments or via the use
of an .Xresources file. 

Some WM's provide more or less functionality for this behavior relative
to user customization. For example, Sawfish provides quite a bit,
whereas Metacity hides much of it.

You may want to check the documentation for the WM that you are using.

There is also an application called Devil's Pie:

  http://www.burtonini.com/blog/computers/devilspie

which provides additional Sawfish-like customization for window
positioning, etc. However, this is global for a given window, not on a
per instance basis.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz

Shengzhe Wu <shengzhe at gmail.com> wrote:
> In the Unix environment, I open a window by x11(). May I specify the
> position of this window by specifying the position of the top left of
> the window as in Windows environment?
I use "xwit" (version 3.4), a system command which manipulates
existing
X windows.  My R code for initiating a graphics window contains:

  system(paste("xwit -move 2045 0 -names 'R Graphics: Device ",
               dev.cur(), "'", sep=""),
ignore.stderr=TRUE)

See, e.g, <http://www.x.org/contrib/utilities/xwit-3.4.tar.gz>.
(I'm pretty sure I got the idea from another kind soul on R-help.)

-- David Brahm (brahm at alum.mit.edu)