[Discuss] Locating specific terminal windows by pty number?

[Dan Ritter]

John Abreau wrote: 
> I usuallyto have many terminal windows open at a time, with most windows
> having multiple tabs.
> 
> Every once in a while I go to edit a file in nvi, only to discover it's
> already locked by another instance of nvi.
> 
> I can find the other instance with "ps x | grep [n]vi", and find its pty id
> (pty/34), but it would take an inordinate amount of time to dig through all
> the open terminals and tabs to locate it.
> 
> Given the pty number and/or the process id, is there a way to quickly
> locate the offending window and raise it to the foreground? Preferably from
> the command line?

>From a command line which can access the X display, 
xwininfo -root -tree -wm

should produce a large list of windows and their properties. One
of these properties is _NET_WM_PID, which is the pid of the
owner of the window. Another property is the Window ID.

Now it's a simple matter* of looking backwards from the PID to
the Window ID and run

xdotool windowfocus $XWINDOW_ID

to get it focus.

Whether or not focus implies raising it is a matter for your
window manager, but it probably does.

wmctrl or https://pypi.org/project/ruamel.ewmh/ might help out,
too.

-dsr-


* I have not tried this.