Tucked away behind a right-click on any KDE 4 menu bar is an intriguing set of Advanced controls, amongst which you'll find Special Windows Settings which allows you to control almost every aspect of a windows placement and appearance. Want OpenOffice.org to always open centred on the second desktop? Want Firefox to open full-screen and without a taskbar or border? The settings are here!

To open access them, either right-click on the application's menu bar or left click the icon in the window's top-left corner. Choose Advanced then Special Windows Setting from the drop-down menu




The resulting dialog box has five tabs and a plethora of controls but usage is very straightforward. The most useful tab, Geometry, opens by default. Tick a tag on the left to activate a setting, then choose from the drop-down options on the right. In the above example, I've forced the window to always open centered on my desktop. What you choose on the left affects what's available on the right. Apart from "centered" I could have chosen any of these options...



There's another bunch of controls under Preferences:



Here you have options to omit borders, skip taskbars, apply shortcuts, control window opacity and even enable close buttons on windows that don't normally allow it.

Workarounds has some useful options to...



including setting maximum and minimum sizes, window types and blocking global shortcuts - particularly useful where global settings clash with an application's default shortcut keys.

You can also list, add and modify window settings from within System Settings. Just click the K-menu, choose Settings, System Settings, Windows Behaviour and Window Specific.