ww. Utility to raise or jump an applications in KDE.

It interacts with KWin using KWin scripts and it is compatible with X11 and Wayland. It also works with multiple screens.

It is intended as a wmctrl alternative (only for the raising windows part)

• Compatible with KDE 5.x and 6.x
• Compatible with Wayland and X11

Installing

• Download ww from this repository
• Copy ww into your path. e.g.:

cp ww /usr/local/bin

Feel free to rename it

Usage

ww only works in KDE. It works in X11 and Wayland.

Example

if you want to raise or jump to an open firefox window:

ww -f firefox -c firefox

if you want to raise or jump to an app with an specific class:

ww -f kitty.terminal -c 'kitty --class kitty.terminal'

Note: In this example kitty allows you to pass the class option that sets the window class. This is a kitty feature, not a ww feature.

if you want to raise any window that matches a title (supports JS regexp):

ww -fa 'Zoom meeting'

if you want to raise or jump to a window using a regex pattern for the class:

ww -fr '^firefox'

if you want to toggle (minimize if active) a window:

ww -f firefox -c firefox -t

if you want to move the window to your current virtual desktop (instead of switching to its desktop):

ww -f firefox -c firefox -m

if you want to raise a window without checking if the process is running (fire and forget mode):

ww -f firefox

if you want to see information about the currently active window:

ww -ia

Parameters:

-h  --help                show this help
-ia --info-active         show information about the active window
-f  --filter              filter by window class (exact match)
-fa --filter-alternative  filter by window title (caption)
-fr --filter-regex        filter by window class using regex pattern
-t  --toggle              also minimize the window if it is already active
-m  --move-to-current     move the window to the current virtual desktop instead of switching to its desktop
-c  --command             command to check if running and run if no process is found
-p  --process             override the process name used when checking if running, defaults to --command
-u  --current-user        will only search processes of the current user (requires loginctl)

Create shortcuts

You can use KDE custom shortcuts to add a custom shortcut that calls ww

How does it work?

Internally ww uses 2 main things to work: pgrep and "on demand" KWin scripts.

When you run, for example ww -f firefox -c firefox, ww tries to find a process running with the specified process name:

pgrep -o -f firefox

This detects if the application is running or not. If the process is running, ww creates a KWin script to raise the window. If not, it launches the command specified with -c.

However, if you omit both -c and -p options (fire and forget mode), ww skips the process check entirely and directly attempts to raise any matching window. This is useful when you just want to raise an existing window without worrying about launching or checking processes.

In both cases, ww creates a file inside ~/.wwscripts to store a temporary kwin script, it loads the script, runs it, stops it and unloads it in a single go.

The kwin script is targeted to find and focus a specific window.

The -ia option works differently: it uses KWin's scripting API to query information about the currently active window without needing to filter or launch anything.

TODO

Here some ideas of improvements that I'd like to explore, but my knowledge on kwin scripts doesn't allow me:

• Do not depend on pgrep to detect if an application is open? (partially addressed: fire and forget mode skips pgrep entirely)
• Use a single kwin script with signals instead of loading and running one each time?