Stable Window Placement (Position and Screen)

[halostatue]

What Operating System(s) are you running on?

macOS

Which Wayland compositor or X11 Window manager(s) are you using?

No response

WezTerm version

20240203-110809-5046fc22

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I'm looking at converting from iTerm2, but there's a few things that I can't quite figure out how to do — or even if they are possible. I suspect that ⅔ of what I want to do here is possible with scripting — but after three days in the weeds of WezTerm config I am drawing blanks, but the last ⅓ may require new features if they are to be supported.

Stable Window Placement

The critical feature for me is having stable window placement on the same screen when Wezterm opens (and preferably when I hit ⌘N). The way I work is generally to have all terminal windows stacked on the right side of my main (laptop) screen. To that end, in iTerm2, I have the following set in Profiles > Default > Window settings:

• 118 columns, 65 rows (I think that wezterm is more compact than iTerm2 compact mode, so it might be 67 rows required)
• Style: Full height Right of Screen
• Screen: Prefer main screen
• Space: Current Space

The style options are Normal, Full Screen, Maximized (window:gui_window():maximize()), No Title Bar, Full-Width Bottom of Screen, Full-Width Top of Screen, Full-Height Left of Screen, Full-Height Right of Screen, Bottom of Screen, Top of Screen, Left of Screen, and Right of Screen.

I’ve seen #5501 on how to centre a window, and I think this should be feasible — but my current solution:

    local main_screen = wezterm.gui.screens().main
    local x = main_screen.width - 1440
    local y = 0

    cmd.position = {
      x = x,
      y = y,
      origin = "MainScreen",
    }

isn't working in the gui-startup event. Because the window hasn't been spawned, I don't think I can get the pixel_width, although it might be possible.

Feature Request 1

It would be nice to add a parameter to maximize() to control the maximization angle.

window:gui_window():maximize() -- same as maximize("Both")
window:gui_window():maximize("Both")
window:gui_window():maximize("Width")
window:gui_window():maximize("Height")

Feature Request 2

It would be nice to have logical window positioning primitives. Instead of positioning the top left corner of a window with set_position(x, y), I’d want to do something like gui_window:set_logical_position { top = 0, right = 0 } to put the window top pixels from the top of the screen (more or less what the y position is now) and right pixels from the right of the screen (this would be akin to setting x to something like screen.width - gui_window.pixel_width).

For the case where the window hasn't been spawned yet, it would be useful to get the predicted size of the window somehow so that cmd.position can be set better.

Feature Request 3

It would be nice to set a screen affinity at the top level. I basically never want a terminal window on my secondary screen.

[halostatue]

The features mentioned here are still of value, but I have the basic feature working. I cannot get the dynamic form working, only the static form.

Static

This uses a fixed width of 1440, which is measured from an open GUI window. It does work, though, once I fixed some logical errors.

  wezterm.on("gui-startup", function(cmd)
    local main_screen = wezterm.gui.screens().main
    local position = {
      x = main_screen.width - 1440,
      y = 0,
      origin = "MainScreen",
    }

    cmd = cmd or { position = position }

    wezterm.mux.spawn_window(cmd)
  end)

Dynamic

I would like to do something more dynamic, but this doesn't work:

  wezterm.on("gui-startup", function(cmd)
    local _tab, _pane, window = wezterm.mux.spawn_window(cmd or {})
    local gui_window = window:gui_window()
    local dimensions = gui_window:get_dimensions()
    local main_screen = wezterm.gui.screens().main
    local x = main_screen.width - gui_window.pixel_width
    local y = 0

    gui_window:set_position(x, y)
  end)

This still wouldn't work because there's no way to force the spawned window to be only on the main screen and gui_window:set_position(x, y) appears to be ignored if { position = { x = 0, y = 0, origin = "MainScreen" } } is provided on the spawn_window line.

[halostatue]

Note: with nightly at least as early as 20241015 and continuing through 20241101, I have observed the following issues:

• position.origin is ignored. I never want new windows opened on my secondary screen but wezterm will launch on the screen which has the active application when launched from WezTerm.app.
• position.x appears to be interpreted differently than 20240203. I have to change it to main_screen.width + 144 to have the window launch on the right side of the window (which doesn't work in any case because position.origin is ignored).
• wezterm.on('gui-attached', …) is causing some sort of of infinite loop / hang when I try to set it up even to maximize the window on launch.

@wez should I open tickets for the above? I don't really have steps for replication.

[wez]

Sure, please file an issue for each distinct issue. Note that without a reproduction scenario it will make it harder to do anything about it.

[Alien-lv426]

You may want to look at wezterm.on('gui-attached') rather than 'gui-startup', which is what I'm using to decide where to place the initial window