Open application on custom desktop in xmonad

Question

Suppose I call shell-command from emacs for example (shell-command "evince"). Is it possible to move the application (in the present example evince) started this way automatically to desktop 5 in xmonad.

Answer 1

A pure xmonad configuration is possible for that. In your .xmonad/xmonad.hs you need to setup a manageHook for that. I included more than one "rule" on purpose.

theManageHook = composeAll [
    -- send applications to the right workspace
    className =? "Evince" --> doShift "5",
    className =? "Pidgin" --> doShift "4"
    --- more settings ...
]

main = do
    xmonad $ gnomeConfig { 
        manageHook = theManageHook <+> manageHook gnomeConfig
    }

You can see the className of given Window with xprop and clicking on the desired window. className refers to the second entry in the xprop-output. If you only want some xproperties, xprop accepts them as arguments:

~ $ xprop WM_CLASS WM_NAME
WM_CLASS(STRING) = "evince", "Evince"
WM_NAME(STRING) = "Document Viewer"

More on that can be found in the Xmonad FAQ.

Answer 2

In the spirit of do one thing and do it well, Devil's Pie was created for these kinds of issues with any standards-compliant WM (such as properly-configured XMonad, also see the FAQ).

Some configuration along the lines (adopted from this tutorial, I do not know if this way of matching Evince actually works, maybe some other way (see the docs) is needed) of

(if
  (is (application_name) "Evince")
    (begin
    (set_workspace 5)
    (maximize)
  )
)

should do the job. Note that Devil's Pie has been mentioned quite often around here, there might be more useful information just a click away.

Answer 3

Here's an approach using xdotool to change the window's class then you can move it to Desktop 5 with XMonad or Devil's pie.

#!/bin/sh
$1 &
NEW_WINDOW_PID=$!

WINDOW_EXISTENCE=$(xdotool search --pid ${NEW_WINDOW_PID} 2> /dev/null) #is empty if the window hasn't finished opening.
COUNTER=0
while [[ -z $WINDOW_EXISTENCE && $COUNTER < 6 ]] #waits for the window to open
do
    WINDOW_EXISTENCE=$(xdotool search --pid ${NEW_WINDOW_PID} 2> /dev/null)
    sleep 1
    (( COUNTER++ ))
done

if [ $COUNTER != "6" ]; then
    NEW_WINDOW_ID=$(xdotool search --onlyvisible --pid ${NEW_WINDOW_PID}) #finds the window that was just opened
    xdotool set_window --class yay ${NEW_WINDOW_ID}; #change the class of the window to yay
fi

And then write a function in emacs

(defun window-in-desktop-5 (cmd)
  "start shell command on desktop 5"
  (interactive "sshell-command: ")
  (shell-command  (concat "/path/to/xdotoolscript " cmd)))

Whenever you call a program through the emacs function it will change the class name of the window as long as the PID of the window is the same as the function that called it otherwise the script will time out after six seconds.