Using AppleScript to Position iChat Windows

We use instant messaging quite a bit at Highwinds. I bounce back and forth between using my laptop by itself, and using it with a secondary 22″ display. Regardless of how I’m using my laptop, I like my iChat windows to fill the laptop screen with about a 3-pixel gap between each of them. This means that when I’m on my laptop alone, its screen gets filled when I Apple-Tab to iChat, and when I’m on a two-monitor setup, the larger attached monitor display is free of chat windows and they are all present on my laptop screen so I can work while watching for chats.

My AIM and GMail buddy lists are about the same length, so I like to stack them on top of each other with half of the screen height given to each. My Highwinds buddy list is the longest, so that gets a full column to itself to the right of my AIM/GMail lists. Finally, I have my chat window occupying the rest of the right-hand side of the display. You can see this in the image below (some screen names have been obscured to protect the innocent).

Unfortunately, Apple hasn’t programmed OS X to remember the position of windows between laptop-only and display-attached configurations, which means I always have to manually move my chat windows back to the second display after I reconnect it to my laptop. This is a pain in the ass. I finally got a few minutes to write an AppleScript to do this for me automatically, presented below.

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-- Get display area
tell application "Finder"
	set displayAreaDimensions to bounds of window of desktop
	set widthOfDisplayArea to item 3 of displayAreaDimensions
	set heightOfDisplayArea to item 4 of displayAreaDimensions
end tell
 
tell application "System Events" to tell process "Dock"
	set dockDimensions to size in list 1
	set heightOfDock to item 2 of dockDimensions
end tell
 
-- Set up desired coordinates when running iChat on the laptop monitor at 1440x900
set maximumChatWindowHeight to (heightOfDisplayArea - heightOfDock)
set chatWindowWidth to 275
set padding to 3
set heightOfMenuBar to 22
set laptopPhysicalDisplayWidth to 1440
 
set aimCoordinates to [0, 0, chatWindowWidth, (maximumChatWindowHeight / 2) - heightOfMenuBar]
set gmailCoordinates to [0, (item 4 of aimCoordinates) + (heightOfMenuBar + padding), chatWindowWidth, maximumChatWindowHeight]
set highwindsCoordinates to [chatWindowWidth + padding, 0, (chatWindowWidth * 2) + padding, maximumChatWindowHeight]
set chatWindowCoordinates to [(chatWindowWidth * 2) + (padding * 2), 0, laptopPhysicalDisplayWidth, maximumChatWindowHeight]
 
-- Shift everything over by laptop display width if using a second monitor
if widthOfDisplayArea is greater than laptopPhysicalDisplayWidth then
	set widthOfSecondaryDisplay to (widthOfDisplayArea - laptopPhysicalDisplayWidth)
	repeat with currentDimensions in [aimCoordinates, gmailCoordinates, highwindsCoordinates, chatWindowCoordinates]
		repeat with itemPosition in [1, 3]
			set item itemPosition of currentDimensions to ((item itemPosition of currentDimensions) + widthOfSecondaryDisplay)
		end repeat
	end repeat
end if
 
-- Position chat windows
tell application "iChat"
	set bounds of window "AIM Buddy List" to aimCoordinates
	set bounds of window "myGoogleTalkAddress@gmail.com" to gmailCoordinates
	set bounds of window "myWorkEmailAddress@highwinds.com" to highwindsCoordinates
	set bounds of windows whose name contains "Chats" to chatWindowCoordinates
end tell

The script is pretty simple. It grabs the screen and dock dimensions, and sets up some global variables. Then, for each of my buddy lists (AIM, GMail, and Highwinds) it sets up 4-coordinate position arrays describing the [top left x, top left y, bottom right x, bottom right y] coordinates that I want each window to end up in. Next, it checks the total display area: if the area is greater than the width of my physical laptop display, it bumps all the X coordinates over by the width of the secondary display so that the windows end up on my laptop display (since I position my laptop to the right of my secondary display). Finally, it tells iChat to position the windows, referencing each by their title bar. I group all my chats in to a single window, so the title of this window is something like “18 Chats”; as a result, I use a query-like expression to reference this window’s title.

Rather than dynamically setting the position of your chat windows, if you would prefer to move your chat windows to the positions that you want them in and have your Mac tell you what the coordinates are, you can use the script below. You can then hard-code these coordinates in to the coordinate arrays in the script above.

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tell application "iChat"
	activate
	set allChatWindows to every window
	repeat with currentWindow in allChatWindows
		set windowBounds to the bounds of currentWindow
		set allBounds to ""
		repeat with bound in windowBounds
			set allBounds to (allBounds & bound & ",")
		end repeat
		display dialog (name of currentWindow & ": " & allBounds)
	end repeat
end tell