I understand that the effort to have a window’s previous size and placement remembered for further use is ongoing. Perhaps that glad day will moot this idea.
Until then, I’ve settled on using Window Behavior > Advanced > Window placement > Minimal Overlapping to at least keep everything from piling up in the center. It works reasonably well, especially with quick meta button-arrow keys to move things around.
However, it is weird when a dialog window opens, say a password-entry window if I’m modifying firewall settings or something else that requires root privileges. This window will show up in a corner of the screen, and I guess I’ve been conditioned to expect that sort of thing to show up in the center.
Is there a way that such windows can still be centered within an overall minimal overlapping setting? Is there some property of dialogs that can be interrogated to set them apart and handle them differently?
I wonder, does it work if you right-click on one of those dialog boxes’ title bars, choose Configure Special Window Settings, and create a Window Rule to define the placement? Perhaps something like this?
Yes there is. Did you notice that dialog windows don’t show up in the task bar? If you type “kwin” in the Kickoff and launch the kwin debug console, you will find that dialog windows have “transient=true” set. Unfortunately you can’t detect this property in window rules, but you can do that in a kwin script.
FWIW the intention is that dialog windows that have a parent set in the code will appear centered in their parent window. Other dialog windows will be treated as ordinary windows and placed according to the window placement mode.
