GNOME Shell extension exposing a D-Bus interface to activate the window with the given title
GPL-2.0 License
This is a GNOME Shell extension to activate (focus, bring to the foreground) a window
based on its title (or WM_CLASS
, see below).
It exposes a D-Bus interface with methods for this purpose;
it has no user interface of its own,
but can be called from the command line or other programs.
The extension, when activated, extends the org.gnome.Shell
service on the session bus
with a /de/lucaswerkmeister/ActivateWindowByTitle
object,
which implements the de.lucaswerkmeister.ActivateWindowByTitle
interface containing the following methods:
WM_CLASS
WM_CLASS
Each method takes a single string argument, and returns a single boolean indicating whether such a window was found or not. Strings are matched case-sensitively. Furthermore, activating a window also activates its workspace.
The WM_CLASS
is originally an X concept, but is available under Wayland as well
(exposed via get_wm_class()
and get_wm_class_instance()
on a Meta.Window
).
It’s a pair of strings (name, instance) forming a kind of “application name”,
and both are more “stable” than the title (which may include changing details);
I believe the name is supposed to be more general than the instance,
but looking at some windows on my system I can’t really tell a difference,
both components seem mostly the same apart from arbitrary capitalization or punctuation differences.
Still, the WM_CLASS
may be useful for activating a certain application regardless of its current window title
(e.g. GNOME Terminal does not include an application name in the window title).
You can see current name and instance strings in Looking Glass (Alt+F2 lg
):
global.get_window_actors().map(a => a.get_meta_window()).map(w => `${w.get_wm_class()} (${w.get_wm_class_instance()})`)
By default, the extension goes through the windows in the order in which Mutter returns them and activates the first one that matches the criterion. If you are often working with ambiguous titles and need more control over this, you can change the behavior by calling the setSortOrder method with one of the following strings:
The method also returns the previous sort order, in case you want to restore it later. Note that the sort order is currently not persisted anywhere (it will start as default in each new GNOME Shell session).
You can call these methods using your favorite D-Bus command line tool, for example:
busctl --user call \
org.gnome.Shell \
/de/lucaswerkmeister/ActivateWindowByTitle \
de.lucaswerkmeister.ActivateWindowByTitle \
activateBySubstring \
s 'Firefox'
gdbus call --session \
--dest org.gnome.Shell \
--object-path /de/lucaswerkmeister/ActivateWindowByTitle \
--method de.lucaswerkmeister.ActivateWindowByTitle.activateBySubstring \
'Firefox'
GNU GPL v2 or later.