Count the minimized windows on Linux with bash

Question

I'm trying to build a script that checks that windows under XFCE are minimized before displaying a window I've chosen (it's a part from a bigger project)

I tried to recover the count of the open windows with wmctrl but these are not the minimized windows :

CURRWORKSPACE=$(wmctrl -d | grep '*' | cut -d ' ' -f1)
OPENWINDOWS=$(wmctrl -l | cut -d ' ' -f3 | grep $CURRWORKSPACE | wc -l)

I also try with xdotool, but without success :(

I was wondering if you knew of any way to get this information. I'm on XFCE, but another way with any tool would be great

Many thanks !

I dont think `bash` is the most appropriate tool for the job, mate. — UtahJarhead, Oct 20 '18 at 16:04
I'm not too familiar with programming for xfce or gnome, but I'd imagine python is closer to what you'd want? That's ONLY a guess. — UtahJarhead, Oct 21 '18 at 03:15

Socowi · Accepted Answer · 2018-10-20T16:55:23.767

Given a window and its id as listed by wmctrl you can use the following function to determine whether that window is minimized. Note that minimized windows are called iconic in X.

# usage: isMinimized <windowId>
# returns status 0 if and only if window with given id is minimized
isMinimized() {
    xprop -id "$1" | grep -Fq 'window state: Iconic'
}

In order to count open windows you can loop over the list of window ids.

openWindows() {
    count=0
    for id in $(wmctrl -l | cut -f1 -d' '); do
        isMinimized "$id" || ((count++))
    done
    echo $count
}

At least on my desktop environment (Cinnamon) some "windows" were always open. These windows are for instance the Desktop. I adjusted the function by filtering out these windows before looping over them. Since they were sticky and I normally don't use sticky windows I just neglected all sticky windows: $(wmctrl -l | grep -vE '^0x\w* -1' | cut -f1 -d' ').

You can adjust the filtering to your needs. In this case all open and non-sticky windows on all workspaces/desktops are counted.

Count the minimized windows on Linux with bash

1 Answers1