Dotan Cohen posted on Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:22:41 +0200 as excerpted:
On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 03:22, Duncan 1i5t5.dun...@cox.net wrote:
2) The scriptable solution makes use of a very handy little app called
wmctrl. You can call wmctrl with appropriate options to move and/or
resize to specific coordinates, close or move to other desktops various
already open windows, in a real-time manner.
Thanks, Duncan! The wmctrl does seem to be what I am looking for. I
installed it and tried playing with it a bit, but I could not get it do
affect any windows. I'll start googling around as I am certain that I am
missing some thing obvious.
First thing, be sure you're either running it as the user you're logged
into kde as, in an environment inherited from kde (such as from a konsole
window, not from a virtual terminal text login that doesn't know about
your X session), or that you set the DISPLAY variable, etc. In konsole
it should be set automatically, tho. You can check the variable in
konsole by issuing the echo $DISPLAY command (no quotes of course).
Here, it returns :0 (no quotes).
Second thing, checkout the manpage, and first try the -l option (with
some windows open, of course, for it to report on). That should list the
managed windows, including a plasma-desktop window for the desktop
itself, and for each of the panels (so here I have three plasma-desktop
windows listed, two panels plus the desktop). Similarly, -d should list
your desktops, and -m should list the window manager (KWin) and some info
about it. If those options aren't reporting anything, wmctrl isn't
seeing your X/kde session for some reason.
You can then try wmctrl -d to list the desktops, wmctrl -n number to
set it to one more than there were, and wmctrl -d again, to check that it
took. Of course you can then set it back to the normal number of
desktops if you wish.
All these basics work, here.
Third, the following should be obvious, and probably will be in
hindsight, but it still feels a bit weird to me, and if I hadn't been
paying attention reading the manpage, I'd have gotten in wrong:
Near the bottom of the manpage it explains the WIN parameter notation.
It's worth noting that we're working with WINDOWS here, NOT WHOLE
PROCESSES, so feeding wmctrl a PID (process-ID) as you'd feed to kill, or
feeding it a procname/exename, as you'd feed to killall, will probably
*NOT* work as intended.
If you think about it, it couldn't work that way, since as I mentioned
above, plasma-desktop for instance has three open windows here, and just
using the PID or process name isn't enough to identify which window you
intended to manipulate.
Instead, the WIN paramater by default substring-matches (case
insensitive) against the window TITLE. Thus, the TITLE is what you need
to match against.
For instance, here, I have a konsole window sitting at the bash prompt,
with bash in the titlebar. I've ensured that it's the only one running
ATM so the wrong one won't get matched, accidentally. Typing this at
that konsole prompt causes that window to close, as you'd expect from the
manpage:
wmctrl -c bash
Meanwhile, wmctrl -c konsole doesn't close the window (tho it might close
another one with konsole in the name if there is one), because that's the
name of the app, not the title of the window.
Fourth, try the mentioned :SELECT: special string, as mentioned in the
manpage under the WIN description, like this:
wmctrl -c :SELECT:
That should give you a cross-hairs pointer, that lets you click on a
window to close it. Don't click the wrong one! =:^)
Fifth, if the title matching isn't working but :SELECT: does, I'd guess
it may have something to do with either unicode or possibly right-to-left
window titles (I'm presuming...). Try the workaround noted near the
bottom of the manpage to see if that works. If not, it's probably time
to file a bug with either the wmctrl author or your distro, specifically
mentioning R2L titles, UTF8, etc, as appropriate. While I'm at least
partially UTF8 here, I'm en_US, as close to basic POSIX as it gets other
than the unicode, so wouldn't expect the trip-ups in that regard that
someone with I'd guess native RtL Hebrew window titles might have.
[1] When kde4 broke multi-key hotkeys that worked just fine in kde3, I
rolled my own solution. I'm not a C/C++ or even python/perl coder,
only a bash scriptor, so I coded the script in bash and run it in a
special konsole window with its own kwin window rules. It's not fancy,
but it does a rather impressive job, considering it's all bash and kwin
rules, picking up where all kde4 left me was broken pieces of a
solution that USED to work! A kde single-key hotkey still launches my
script tho there's independent hotkey solutions out there too, if kde
decides to break that as well. My script in turn takes a category and
then an action selection key, to launch anything I use often enough to
have programmed a
