WindowFlow

Effortlessly restore and organize your workspace with our customizable app launcher.

I often have multiple projects running simultaneously and it always frustrated me that I couldn't easily restore my workspace. By workspace, I mean a set of windows that are opened and positioned appropriately. For example, one workspace may consist of Firefox with three tabs maximized on one screen, two file explorers side by side on the other screen, and Unreal Engine on top of it.

Inspired by Curtis Holt's recent video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDawvvcx1dE), I began searching for a solution to this problem. However, it seemed that there were none available for Windows or they were quite expensive for such a simple functionality. After discussing with Mathew in Curtis's Discord community, we decided to create our own solution.

Here it is - the first version, which has relatively simple functionality. It launches all the apps based on a manually written config file and places them in set positions. More updates will come in the future (hopefully).

Requirements

For now as we don't provide binary builds the following python dependencies need to be installed:

It needs python and depends on pywin32 (https://pypi.org/project/pywin32/) for it's functionality.

I recommend using conda, e.g.,

conda create --name WindowFlow
conda activate WindowFlow
conda install pywin32
cd $SOMEWHERE # where you want to have the WindowFlow
git clone https://github.com/Vertex-Rage-Studio/WindowFlow.git
cd WindowFlow

Running WindowFlow

Running from command line

Restoring session

To run the example confing file you simply type:

python windowflow.py -c config_test.cfg

Config file has simple line based format, where | is used as a separator. See example of config file for description and example.The example config file will run:

explorer.exe pointint at C:\Users at location (100, 100) and size of window of (900,700)
it will open 2 new tabs in firefox, one pointing to google, one to bing (or if it's not launched - should launch a new window and open those 2 tabs)
it will run another explorer.exe (without path) at (500,300) and size of window of (900, 700)
it will launch new firefox window, open blender.org site and move it to the 2nd screen on the left (example config assumes that you have one)
it will launch Blender with D:\tmp\test.blend, and move it to (0,0) and set it's size to (2500,1380)
it will launch pureref with D:\AssetsLibrary\Ref\low-poly-graveyard.pur on the second screen and will make it's window take almost full screen

Of course you will not have the .blend and .pur file or you might not have even firefox installed, so adjust the config to your needs.

There is also a minimalistic config file provided provided. Launching with this one, will just open 2 firefox tabs (pointing to google.com and bing.com) and 2 explorer windows.

Storing session

To store current in test.cfg session use:

python windowflow.py -m store-session -c test.cfg

The resulting config file will need tweaking.

At the moment it gets all the executable paths to top level windows with titles (some of it you will want to remove)
If any of the executalbe needs command line arguments (like a path or filename or URL to open) you will need to add those arguments manually. See example of config file
If any application is usually taking more than 1 sec to launch, tweak the dealy (3rd element)
For any process that needs to be run in separate shell (cmd window) you need to flip the 4th argument to True

Roadmap

~~step 1: - make it launch apps based on manually written config file~~ Done
step 2: tool for helping in writing the config file
step 3: UX
step 4: polish (i.e., we might never get to it)

Polish feature list

Bellow are features that we think should be added in the polishing phase

preserving windows grouping (this will probably be quite complex to implement)