On my desktop, where I have plenty of screen real-estate, whenever I start writing an e-mail, the window comes up all the way on the right side of my right display. Which is not at all where I want it, that ends up being at like my "two o'clock" position. This is not an issue on my laptop, because of the small screen.

Continue reading for more information on how I solved this.

My first stab at fixing this was to change my "External Editor" plugin for Thunderbird so that it would specify a geometry that caused it to open on the right side of the left display, which is great. I had some troubles with that though, because it seemed like it was not persisting across reboots, but I think I have that corrected by forcing it to save the setting by exiting Thunderbird after changing it. The external editor string I use is: "gvim --nofork -geometry 80x45-2560+0"

To get the "message compose" window to come up in that same position, I did this in KDE:

• Open the Thunderbird "compose message" window.
• Go to "System Settings".
• Click on the "Window Behavior" icon.
• Click on "Window Rules" in the left hand side pane.
• Click "New".
• Click the "Detect Window Properties" button.
• Click on the Thunderbird "compose message" window.
• Make sure that the "Use window class and window role" radio-button is checked.
• Click "Ok" on that window.
• Click on the "Geometry" tab.
• Either: Check "Position" and set it to "Apply Initially" and the x,y position you want, or check "Placement" with "Force Temporarily" and "On main window" or "Under cursor". Depending on how you want it placed.
• Click on "Ok".
• Click on "Apply".

This works brilliantly, but I often don't think about doing that initially.

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