How to programmatically switch to a specific windo

Question

Is there a command to tell compiz that we want to bring in front and set focus to a specific window? How should we identify the window in that command?

The reason behind this question is the following use-case:

Suppose we have a wiki to keep notes of anything interesting we find out. It would be very convenient to have a keyboard shortcut to bring the browser window with our Wiki page in front and start typing immediately then with another key combination switch to the application we were working before

I know that ALT + TAB switches between the last two used windows but cannot support more complex combinations of applications. E.g Browser+Eclipse+ Wiki

If there is a command like the one described, it is easy to add a shortcut to it from KDE or GNOME interface

Answer 1

This worked for me with Compiz:

xdotool windowactivate `xdotool search --onlyvisible --class firefox`

Answer 2

You'll want to send the _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW client message to the root window. This will alert any compliant window manager (including Compiz) that you are requesting to make active a particular window.

See the EWMH spec, specifically the section on _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW.

Note that depending on the window manager's configuration, it may refuse to honor your request, or give the user the chance to ignore it.

Answer 3

I found this web page that has an example source program you could compile that will take bring an X window to the front.

The key is the X11 function XRaiseWindow.

I imagine it would be pretty easy to write a small program and either write a wrapper script or just make the program itself robust, and then set Compiz to attach this to a global keyboard shortcut.

Answer 4

What you are looking for is wmctrl. For example, add a keyboard shortcut to invoke a command like

wmctrl -Fa 'Wiki - Google Chrome'

to raise and activate the window with that title.

There are different ways of selecting a window by title, id, etc. See man wmctrl. The list of windows can be obtained running

$ wmctrl -l

I haven't tried it with compiz but wmctrl should work for any EWMH compliant window manager.

Answer 5

The Widget plugin could do what you describe.

• Configure the Widget plugin to mark the desired windows as widgets (e.g. by matching on window title or role).
• Configure the Window Rules plugin to make widget windows present on all workspaces (sticky) and to skip the taskbar.

See http://wiki.compiz.org/Plugins/Widget