How are windows rules supposed to work?

Help
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1

In theory, this is a great feature but I struggle to use it. I am on Fedora 42 Kde Edition

The only way it works for me is:

  1. Rightclick a title bar and choose “Configure Special Window Setting” fro a given window
  2. Add some property, I tried Size, “Maximized horizontally” and “Screen”.
  3. When I set them to “Apply now” and hit Apply, windows get moved/resized (both KDE aps and GTK apps).

Apart from one case, when I managed to force all my windows to Screen 0 (not sure how I did it), it does not work when I then launch thewindows no matter what I set as Apply Initially/Force etc. It also seems the rules do not get saved quite often (always?), but when I try to exactly recreate them through KCM, they do not seem to trigger.

Is this a bug? Am I doing something wrong? At what point are the actions supposed to be stored?

There are some bugs reported, but nothing so major: https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=__open__&component=rules&list_id=3244450&product=kwin

2

these two options have always been confusing to me with lots of overlap and similar UI.

Screenshot_20250916_060342
Screenshot_20250916_060342698×455 45.4 KB

it helps to realize that using either of those dumps you into an editor mode sub-menu of settings > window rules, which you can back out of by clicking on the < in the window header.

using the context menu just fills in the description and window class details for you vs. when go in thru the settings page, those are blank.

nothing seems to be saved unless you use + Add New… and Apply, then you can navigate back and see that it has been added to the settings page where you can now sort, edit, duplicate, or delete them.

beyond that cursory understanding i’ve never really been able to get these settings to bend to my will either. In fact, looking at it just now i realized there was a rule in place causing gthumb to not maximize properly due to a size rule, which i have now deleted.