Nautilus ignores --geometry argument

Binary package hint: nautilus

Nautilus 2.20.0, Ubuntu 7.10, AMD64 machine

I have looked and don't see any other bug reports about this yet, though I have seen queries about it on foums.

I use Nautilus in "Browser" mode normally, rather than in "Spatial" mode.

I have been trying to make sense of the Nautilus "--geometry" command line argument. Regrettably the manual doesn't tell you the format of the argument - A terse "--geometry=GEOMETRY" is all it says.

By experimenting (and a little snippet from forums) I deduced that the --geometry argument is in the format WxH+HO+VO meaning dialog box width x height plus horizontal offset (start point) and vertical offset (start point).

The reason I care about the geometry argument is that I wanted to have a button (script) that launches 2 Nautilus browser windows in split-window fashion, to facilitate drag-and-drop operations. Here's my little test script for it:

[CODE]
#!/bin/sh
nautilus --geometry=1280x512+0+0
nautilus --geometry=1280x512+0+512
[/CODE]

This should open two full-width windows (my screen res is 1280x1024), one at top of screen and other at lower half of screen. Sometimes it does. But Nautilus evidently has a memory. If you have clicked the "maximise" icon near top-right of the previous Nautilus session, then when the above script launches you get two full-screen windows instead - so it takes no notice of the geometry argument. You have to un-maximise each window manually to get what is wanted.

Evidently Nautilus is programmed to ignore command line arguments some of the time :(

It would be preferable for Nautilus to have a built-in toolbar button that switched to a dual-window mode. But I had hoped that this simple script would do the job and am disappointed that Nautilus won't respect its own command-line argument.

I realise that I could switch to Spatial mode as the default Nautilus behaviour and then open two windows. But that is not as useful to me as having two browser windows docked together.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Oct 20 07:06:40 2007
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/nautilus
Package: nautilus 1:2.20.0-0ubuntu7
PackageArchitecture: amd64
ProcCmdline: nautilus --no-default-window --sm-client-id default2
ProcCwd: /home/tonywhelan
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
 LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: nautilus
Uname: Linux HERCULES 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Sun Oct 14 21:45:15 GMT 2007 x86_64 GNU/Linux