Tool for selecting window by searching in X11?

Question

I often have many windows open on many virtual desktops and I have hard time finding some application.

So is there any tool for searching open windows?

Currently I using Awesome as my window manager, but it does not need to be dependent on it.

Answer 1

I use dmenu.

An script in my ~/bin called go-win

#!/bin/bash
wmctrl -l | cut -d' ' -f5- | dmenu -nb '#3f3f3f' -nf '#dcdccc' -sf '#3f3f3f' -sb '#dcdccc' -i | xargs wmctrl -a

and a global key in my rc.lua

awful.key({ modkey }, "g", function() exec("go-win") end)

Using that you'll get the list of open windows on the top of screen, and it does incremental search as you type.

Answer 2

KDE 4 has a standard program, Krunner, that will do this (among other things - basically it works like Launchy). I don't know whether it would work with a different window manager/desktop environment, but I figured I'd mention it in case you wanted to give it a try.

Answer 3

With the Sawfish window manager (a stacking manager extensible in Scheme), I like iswitch-window. Press the shortcut key, then a few letters in the window name, and Enter.

A similar interface for Gnome, iswitch-window.py, is included in the DeskBar applet.

I'd be surprised, even a little disappointed, if Awesome didn't have something similar. If not, you could always write it in Lua.

You could implement a similar feature in a window manager-agnostic way in a text terminal using a shell's completion mechanism (zsh, or perhaps bash) and the wmctrl command.