I (inappropriately) asked over here
in this Desktop thread how to manage workspace placement of applications over the long-term. Over the weekend I installed deb13 on my system 76 laptop and finally spent some time trying to figure this out. The answer is people have asked for "control which workspace applications launch in" on the xcfe forums going back at least as far as 2012, and the maintainers have been said "not my problem". But! There's a solution, and it's called
Devilspie2. I worked out how to do what I want by looking at their emacs sample and then seeing they have a
set_window_workspace function you can run. I'm not done scripting this thing up but for my purposes if I can get my like 6 or 7 applications I use all the time working the right way onto the correct workspace then I'm good. I already fixed up emacs and terminal so that's a good start to what I'll probably ever want on this computer to manage.
I also need a way to get the app to run at window manager login which I may do as a login item in xcfe or a systemd service, which I saw a sample I can adapt in
this blog post on getting monitors to behave predictably.
I hope this helps someone who is also extremely annoyed about where windows pop up in their workspaces!
