Nautilus window outside the screen, unreachable, after resuming from hibernation

[teo1978]

I always work with an external display connected to my laptop.
The external display is selected as the only display, and the laptop's built-in screen is switched off.

Often I hibernate, move the laptop to another place (e.g. from home to the workplace and viceversa), connect a different external screen, and resume from hibernation.

When I do so, it often happens that, if I had one or more Nautilus windows open before hibernation, one or more of them are partially or completely outside the screen. When they are partially, they are moved way to the left, and only the right-most part of the window is visible at the left of the screen. In this case I can reach the window with the mouse cursor, click and drag it to the right so it's completely within the screen.
But sometimes, the window is completely unreachable, as if it's completely outside the screen (presumably to the left of it, since when it's reachable, it's always to the left).

In these cases, there's NOTHING I can do to reach the window and gain access to it. I can right-click on the Launcher icon of the window, but that doesn't give me any way (none that is discoverable, at least) to bring the "lost" window into the visible area of the screen.

This sounds mostly like a bug in Xorg or Compiz whatever the window manager is. The fact that it is even POSSIBLE for a window to be moved completely outside of the screen in such a way that you have no way to get access to it, IS certainly a bug or design flaw in whatever piece of software is responsible for managing windows. So is the fact that, when that happens, there is no tool for gaining access to it.

[EDIT: Not true] However, I have never, ever observed this with windows belonging to any other application except Nautilus. When I hibernate and resume, I usually have several windows open belonging to different applications: Thunderbird, Chrome, Filezilla, Gimp, and others, and often several terminal windows. Yet it has never, ever happened to me that one of them was completely or mostly outside of the screen as it happens with Nautilus. So there seems to be something specific to Nautilus. So it looks like Nautilus is doing something wrong, or failing to do something it's supposed to do, though the fact that the system even allows it to happen, means there's also a bug in the system (whether it's Xorg, Compiz, Unity or whatever).

Note that this is a very critical issue, as not being able to access a window means potentially lose work. Fortunately, being a file explorer (as opposed to some other program where you may have unsaved changes to some document), usually the damage is small. However, you may have carefully chosen a set of folders that you have opened in tabs, and/or you may have carefully selected a particular set of files in each tab; having to close the window means you have to repeat the process of selecting those files and folders. That is just an example of loss of work due to this bug.

So before wrongly assigning it low importance as you often do, think twice.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
Package: nautilus 1:3.18.4.is.3.14.3-0ubuntu6
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.4.0-146.172-generic 4.4.177
Uname: Linux 4.4.0-146-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_uvm nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.18
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Sat May 11 16:21:00 2019
GsettingsChanges:
 b'org.gnome.nautilus.window-state' b'sidebar-width' b'192'
 b'org.gnome.nautilus.window-state' b'geometry' b"'1183x822+670+1147'"
 b'org.gnome.nautilus.list-view' b'use-tree-view' b'true'
 b'org.gnome.nautilus.list-view' b'default-column-order' b"['name', 'size', 'type', 'date_modified', 'date_accessed', 'owner', 'group', 'permissions', 'mime_type', 'where']"
InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-10-11 (2037 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" - Release amd64 (20130424)
SourcePackage: nautilus
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[teo1978 (teo8976)]

I was wrong about this:

> However, I have never, ever observed this with windows belonging to any other application except Nautilus

I've just observed the issue with Terminal too.

So it's almost certainly nothing to do with Nautilus, unsurprisingly.

[teo1978 (teo8976)]

Does anyone know of a workaround to bring a window into the screen? I can't believe there's no way to do that.

[Khurshid Alam (khurshid-alam)]

It looks like something gone wrong with compiz settings. Try resetting everything. I can't reproduce this 19.10.

[teo1978 (teo8976)]

What do you mean by reset everything?