Thanks for asking, this is a good reason to fix this annoying thing for myself... The key line in the debug log seems to be this:
09.12.2014 21:26:17 - This window is a dialog window, setting floating
A bit of digging leads to commit 8ed95ae58cb371a24214ec0474199f5551829cd6 that was made as a fix to Bug 1182. Apparently, it has been deemed reasonable to assume that when an application requests a specific size, that it needs to be treated as a floating window.
Luckily, rdesktop
also allows the size to depend on the screen size. With -g 100%
, I managed to get the nice behavior back without specifying custom matchers in i3.conf
.
Edit: Thanks, Daniel, for pointing out that this does not work in a multimonitor setup. Also, in a single monitor setup, rdesktop
is not aware of i3bar
, and a portion disappears from the screen. I ended up making a matcher in my i3.conf
:
for_window [class="^rdesktop"] move workspace number 5; floating disable