How can my shell script control the placement of a zenity window?

Norman Ramsey picture Norman Ramsey · Nov 11, 2009 · Viewed 8.7k times · Source

I'm using zenity to post a simple notification when my spam-filter daemon filters a group of messages. Currently this message is posted to the middle of the screen, which is obtrusive. I want to post it to the upper left corner. However, zenity does not honor the -geometry option which is supposed to be standard for all X applications, and its documentation gives options for controlling window height and width, but not placement.

Is there a way to control the (x,y) coordinate at which a zenity window is posted?

If not, is there a way to solve this problem by tinkering with X resources or the window manager (I'm using the fvwm)?


EDIT: The following do not work in ~/.fvwm2rc (fvwm version 2.5.26):

Style "Information" PositionPlacement -0 -0
Style "Zenity" PositionPlacement -0 -0

They also don't work with the -0 -0 dropped, as suggested in the man page. (The window title for zenity --info is "Information".)

Interestingly, zenity was ignoring my earlier window-manager directive that windows should be placed manually by default.


EDIT:

Among many other fascinating pieces of information, xprop(1) reports this about the zenity window:

_NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE(ATOM) = _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_DIALOG
WM_NORMAL_HINTS(WM_SIZE_HINTS):
                program specified location: 0, 0
                program specified minimum size: 307 by 128
                program specified maximum size: 307 by 128
                window gravity: NorthWest
WM_CLASS(STRING) = "zenity", "Zenity"
WM_ICON_NAME(STRING) = "Information"
WM_NAME(STRING) = "Information"

Despite this apparently encouraging report, the window is not in fact posted at the location 0,0 :-(

I know the Style command is taking effect because I added the !Borders option, and sure enough the zenity window posts without borders... but still in the center of the damn screen!

Answer

Roland picture Roland · Nov 8, 2012

I do it by using wmctrl in a subshell. Example:

((sleep .4;wmctrl -r TeaTimer -R TeaTimer -e 0,50,20,-1,-1)
for ((a=$LIMIT; a > 0; a--)); do
# for loop generates text, not shown
done
wmctrl -R TeaTimer
) | zenity --progress --title="TeaTimer" --percentage=0

First wmctrl moves zenity to upper left, second moves it to current workspace. See a full example.