KWin Basics part 1.1 - Window Management

KDE has its own Window Manager (WM) named KWin. KWin is great! It remembers your window sizes and placements, so that when you open those applications in the future, they're right where you left them.

I lived for a long time (4months?) with my Kubuntu Feisty using some other Windows Manager, and it drove me crazy. I had tried to install Pluto (the Media Center for your computer and television, aka LinuxMCE) on my system, and while it was warned as beta software, I was unprepared for the replacement of KWin, and the inability to get my KWin back.

When I installed Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10, I was determined to not let my KWin go!

Why do I love KWin so much? Like the rest of KDE, KWin is highly configurable. The most useful setting is the ability to force a window to stay "below" or
"above" all of the other windows on my desktop. The easiest way to describe this is with a Chat program -- you may want a full screen web browser open on your computer, but if someone starts a chat with you, you don't want to either sacrifice the size of the browser, nor keep flipping back and forth between the two.

The solution is to right-click the Titlebar (the thing which currently reads: 'lefty.crupps' GNUski Bacon - Blogspot -- Mozilla Firefox' or something similar) and highlight Advanced; on the popout window, select Keep Above Others -- see the screenshot above. This will force that window, temporarily, to stay visible when you're doing other work. You can follow the same steps to turn off the Keep Above setting. There is also a Keep Below setting, useful maybe for a program running in the background. These settings reset when you close the application -- in the future we will look at making this more permanent.