Windowgrouper 0.2

Windowgrouper is a GNOME 2 panel applet that allows you to group windows together so that when one window in a group is minimized, unminimized, or moved to another desktop, the same operation is applied to the other windows in that group.

Windowgrouper is very easy to use, and its arguably useful.

Installation:

After you download the source archive and extract the source tree, change to the top directory of the windowgrouper-applet tree. You can build and install Windowmake with the following commands:

./configure &&
make &&
sudo make install

This will install the applet under the /usr/local prefix. You may need to tell GNOME where to look to find the Windowgrouper applet. You can do this by editing the file /etc/bonobo-activation/bonobo-activation-config.xml and adding /usr/local/lib/bonobo/servers to the searchpath.

Alternatively, you can tell the configure script to install in the /usr prefix (or in which ever prefix your GNOME installation happens to be). This way, no further configuration is required. Here are the commands that I use:

./configure --prefix=/usr --libexecdir=/usr/lib/gnome-panel &&
make &&
sudo make install

Usage:

Add the Windowgrouper applet to a panel like you would any other applet, by right clicking on the panel and selecting Add to Panel... Select the Windowgrouper applet from the Desktop & Windows section.

Clicking on the running applet will change the mouse pointer to the crosshairs cursor and a status window will appear in the middle of the screen to indicate that you can select a window. If you now click on a window a menu will pop up that allows you to assign the window to a group.

If you right click on the applet and select Collect New Group from the menu, you can click on a series of windows to add them all to a new group. When youre done selecting windows, just click on the desktop, the panel, or the Windowgrouper status window. You can cancel with the Escape key.

When one window in a group is hidden or minimized, so are the other members of the group. The same is true when a window is unminimized. Additionally, moving a window to a different workspace will move the other group members as well.