JSON Wmctrl

This is a partial reimplementation of wmctrl, the linux tool to interact with windows, but supports JSON output for more subtle control.

At the moment, this only supports window listing because that is all I needed. The syntax is not compatible with the original wmctrl.

Motivation

I use the wmctrl tool to raise windows like so [[wmctrl]] -x -a "Firefox". However, this does not work well if you have multiple windows. I wanted to use wmctrl to get all firefox windows and toggle between them. But the output from wmctrl was difficult to parse.

Usage

json-wmctrl will output all top level windows in JSON.

You can search by class name with json-wmctrl --class "Firefox" for example (this support regular expressions).

There is a flag --next-unfocused which will output just the next unfocused window. This can be used together with wmctrl -i -a and jq to cycle focus through windows.

Alternatives and prior work

This uses the Xlib python library, which you could use directly. See this stackoverflow post on the topic.

This C++ command line tool by DarkMaguz implements this feature. But it is not easy to install like pip programs.

About me

I am @readwithai. I make tools for reading and agency sometimes in Obsidian and occassionally write about these things. I also have a side-line in small useful tools.

If any of that sounds useful, you can follow me on X. I often post about command-line hacks and tools here. You can also follow me on my blog (https://readwithai.substack.com).

Also you could read with review of note taking with Obsidian.