Script to focus and raise window demanding attention

Vaughn Dickson — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:17:39 +0000

I’m running Openbox with Gnome on Linux, and windows demanding attention show in
the taskbar with a yellow highlight, usually Skype IMs or something.
I’ve created the following bash script that I bind to a hotkey win-j, and pressing it changes to the correct desktop, raises the window, and focuses it. Huge time saver!

for id in `wmctrl -l | cut -d " " -f 1`; do
    xprop -id $id | grep "_NET_WM_STATE_DEMANDS_ATTENTION" 2>&1 > /dev/null
    if [ "$?" = "0" ]; then
        wmctrl -i -a $id
        exit 0
    fi
done
exit 1

Requirements: Wmctrl (sudo apt-get install wmctrl)

Here’s another adaptation I’ve added. Two scripts, one bound to Win-r to jump to the window demanding attention, and another bound to W-Shift-r that jumps back to the window you were busy with.

First:

#!/bin/bash
activeWinIdLine=`xprop -root | grep _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW\(WINDOW\) `
activeWinId="${activeWinIdLine:40}"
echo $activeWinId > ~/activeWinId
for id in `wmctrl -l | cut -d " " -f 1`; do
	xprop -id $id | grep "_NET_WM_STATE_DEMANDS_ATTENTION" 2>&1 > /dev/null
	if [ "$?" = "0" ]; then
		wmctrl -i -a $id
		exit 0
	fi
done
exit 1

Second:

#!/bin/bash
if [ -f ~/activeWinId ]; then
	origWinId=`cat ~/activeWinId`
	wmctrl -i -a $origWinId
fi

Ninja Monkeys! » scripts

Script to focus and raise window demanding attention