Smart Window Placement?

[George De Bruin]

I'm thoroughly puzzled by the smart window placement policy of OpenBox 
as it exists in version 3.4.4.  This just doesn't seem to be doing what 
I would have expected it to do.

Here's what I expect: OpenBox should be scanning left to right, from top 
to bottom of the desktop to determine where there is a large enough open 
space for the window to be created.

However, on my system strange things happen.  For example, after just 
logging into a clean session, I tried to start firefox.  I expected the 
window to come up on the far left side of the display, which is where it 
started last time, and was where I closed it out when I exited my 
previous session.  However, this time, it came up on the right half of 
the screen.  I don't get it.

I should explain that I am working inside of Xfce, and that there were a 
few apps loaded during start up, including a terminal along the bottom 
of the left side of the screen, snackAmp in the bottom right corner, and 
two Xfce panels (along the top and far right of the screen).

None of these should be getting in the way of Firefox starting in it's 
normal position.  It wasn't going to overlap the terminal window. I've 
also see more strange behavior with other applications.  For example, 
I've started ObConf, and had it come up in an empty space, then started 
another application with a smaller window that should have come up just 
below it, only to have it centered on a *different* application's 
window: not remembering where it opened last time, not centered on the 
screen, not centered on the desktop, and not using any of the free 
spaces that it would have fit in.  So, I am just baffled, and have to 
say that this has been the most frustrating aspect of working with 
OpenBox that I have encountered so far.

I am going to include a screen shot of how this came up (I switched to 
another desktop to preserve this bizarre behavior).  Also note the 
following:

    - The FireFox window only comes down as far as the top of the 
"Kahvi" text on the wall paper, whereas the top of the terminal is just 
below the bottom of the "Kahvi" text (this makes more sense when you see 
the screen shot).

    - When I opened Thunderbird to write this message, it came up on the 
left, and overlapped the terminal window (I'll include a screen shot of 
that too.)

    - I don't have the "Place new windows under the mouse pointer" 
option turned on.

    - The per-app properties set on the terminal are as follows:

<!--
    Messages terminal window
-->
   <application name="Messages" class="XTerm">
    <decor>no</decor>
    <desktop>all</desktop>
    <layer>below</below>
    <skip_pager>yes</skip_pager>
    <skip_taskbar>yes</skip_taskbar>
    <focus>no</focus>
    </application>

I'm also attaching my rc.xml file, in case there are any other questions 
about my config settings -- but I've pretty much left these as default 
(except for changing some keybindings, and adding my per-app properties).

Any help understanding this is appreciated.  The documentation certainly 
isn't making it clear...

// George
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