How to focus on window by ID?

[bimlas]

Hi!

I would like to write a script which is creating a new workspace, moving windows to it, doing some other stuff and finally it's focusing on a moved window.

I tried qtile.window[WINDOW_ID].focus(), but it's not working. Should I switch to the group first? If yes, how to do it? I looked at the documentation a lot, but without examples, it's hard to find the solution.

Thanks in advance!

[ervinpopescu]

How do you plan to create a new workspace? Qtile's workspaces (groups) are "static" per se. AFAIK, in order to add a new group, you need to add it in the config and reload the config.

[elParaguayo]

That's the PID, not the window id. For the x11 backend, the qtile window id is the same one reported by the x server.

[ervinpopescu]

Hm, i don't have another atom that reports any type of id for alacritty, lemme try on another window...
Yeah, I don't see any for firefox either, how can I find out the id of a window, some other way than the way of qtile? :)

[elParaguayo]

Yeah, not every window sets that atom.

You can do something like this to get the ID of a window under the cursor:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import xcffib
import xcffib.xproto


conn = xcffib.connect()
root = conn.get_setup().roots[0].root

response = conn.core.QueryPointer(root)
info = response.reply()

if info.child:
    print(f"Window id under pointer: {info.child}")

You can also look at qtile.current_window etc if using qtile internals.

EDIT: I imagine xdotool might be able to do something here too. Never used it though.

[bimlas]

Ok, I just had to switch to group first:

qtile.group[group].toscreen()
qtile.window[focused_client_id].focus()