mjhjmtu

I use my function keys for specific applications (F1 chrome, F2 terminal, etc). I have a script bound to a shortcut key to activate the right application, and that works, but it doesn't activate the most-recently-focused window. The script lists windows with wmctrl -lx which seems to list windows by reverse-creation order. Is there any way to ask for or keep track of the order specific windows are activated so I can script "activate the most recent terminal window"?

Alternately, it seems if I was able to get the window stack order maintained by xfwm4 (which it uses when you cycle through windows), that seems like it would solve my problem as well but I don't see a command line interface to get at that window stack order.

In a script, you could use wmctrl, xprop and awk to use the activation time that is maintained by the window manager. (See e.g. wm-spec 1.5). E.g., use a (multi-line) command line like the following:

W=$(wmctrl -l | 
 awk '$ ~ "Terminal" print $1;' | while read x ; do 
 echo "$x $(xprop -id $(xprop -id $x 
 | awk '$1 ~ /_NET_WM_USER_TIME/ print $NF' 
 ) 
 | awk 'print $NF' 
 )" ; 
 done | awk '$2>t i=$1; t=$2 END print i' 
 )

In words:

1. pass the wmctrl list through a filtering to select the window ids of the named application ("Terminal" in the example above); then


2. pass this through (innermost) xprop to get a (pretend) window id for the last usage time, and


3. using another (outer) xprop to get that timestamp , which is the (single) property of the "pretend window" of the _NET_WM_USER_TIME_WINDOW of the original window; then


4. pass all the resulting id and timestamp lines through an awk filter that reports the id with the greatest timestamp.