How to reset default window positions and sizes?

Solution 1:

I found this answer while doing some research into your problem and I thought that it might be of use as while it wont reset the default permissions it will allow you to choose the size of the window when the program is opened.

Solution 2:

General solution:

Using the dconf editor (the GUI one, via the dconf-editor package on ubuntu and similar, is most convenient, though the command line one via dconf-cli probably will work too) search for the relevant settings. For GTK standard dialogs such as the file chooser, color chooser, etc, they are likely located in org/gtk/settings, and for standalone applications, they are likely located in org/gnome.

Different applications store their settings in different ways so your mileage may vary, but try looking around in there for the application (or vendor thereof) you are using, and see if you can find a key relating to window size.

I fixed my problem by setting org/gtk/settings/file-chooser/window-size to (800, 600), and the next time I used the open-file dialog, it had the requested size.

Here's what I was doing:

I use X11 forwarding on a remote server for home development and somehow the open file dialog was resized to a very large size, such that it exceeded the size of the monitors upon which I do my work, and I was thus unable to navigate the GUI easily, having to use it by keyboard shortcuts only. This was annoying, but not annoying enough to do something drastic to fix, so it persisted for years (as you cannot resize this dialog via ordinary means when using X11 forwarding on xming). Every so often it would frustrate me and I would search the internet for a solution about how to fix it, finding this and other questions like it on stackoverflow, but with no applicable answers.