== The laziness of a programmer, illustrated At work, I have fallen into the bad habit of keeping a lot of iconified Firefox windows around, full of various things that I am going to read sometime (honest). As I've [[mentioned before ../web/TabsVsWindowsII]], I have all of these iconified windows very carefully placed and organized so that I can find them again and keep track of them. Naturally, this makes quitting and restarting Firefox kind of a pain. I have Firefox set to preserve all of the active windows and tabs over restarts, but it doesn't preserve the positions of the iconified windows (and it doesn't entirely preserve the regular window position either); any time I have to start Firefox again I have to re-position all of those icons. Generally this means that I don't; I never exit Firefox unless I'm forced to, because it's such a pain to get everything set up again. (Which implies that I never log out, either; I just leave my screen locked.) Recently I got tired of this (in the aftermath of my Fedora 13 upgrade, I've been restarting things more than usual). Thus I decided that clearly there had to be a way to fish around in the depths of X to find the current icon positions, so I could write a quick script that recorded them in a file and then shuffled the icons back into the right spots for me. (This is less crazy than it sounds; I already have command line utilities to reposition windows, and X comes with a fair number of commands to poke at various aspects of window state.) I'll cut to the chase: yes, except that it wasn't exactly a quick script. The most convenient way of doing this turned out to be writing an [[FVWM http://www.fvwm.org/]] module in Perl that finds out all of this information and writes a file of FVWM commands that can be loaded back in to FVWM to (re)position and (re)iconify all of my Firefox windows just right. In the process of doing this I had to remember my Perl, look up a certain amount of Perl's OO support (my last serious Perl programming pretty much predates it), and figure out how to work with FVWM's underdocumented Perl bindings. (FVWM has no current Python bindings for would be module authors.) But all of this was less work than continuing to re-position all of my Firefox windows by hand. Honest. (The resulting module is sort of theoretically general. If you are really interested, see [[here ]]. As a bonus, you get to laugh at my hack-job Perl.)