wmctrl mit Homebrew, apk, apt, dnf, MacPorts, Nix, pacman, zypper installieren

Projektlinks

• Homepage
• Upstream-Dokumentation
• Paketmanager-Seite

Befehle und Aliase

• wmctrl

Projektgeschichte

The upstream ChangeLog, preserved in the Conservatory archive, records an initial release by Tomas Styblo on 15 September 2003 and a compact burst of releases through 1.07 on 3 January 2005. The original README identifies Tomas Styblo as author and maintainer, gives the upstream homepage, and states that wmctrl is based on the freedesktop.org EWMH specification.

The Conservatory archive exists because wmctrl had no public upstream version-control repository. Its maintainers imported the upstream tarball history into Git in 2018 and noted that the latest upstream release was still the January 2005 1.07 release.

Adoptionsgeschichte

wmctrl persisted through distribution packaging rather than active upstream development. Debian, Fedora, Arch, Guix, RPM-based distributions, and others have carried version 1.07 or downstream builds because the tool remains handy for X11 desktops, scripts, hotkeys, test automation, and glue code around lightweight window managers.

Wie es verwendet wird

Users run wmctrl to list windows and desktops, activate or close a window, move or resize windows, change desktop geometry, switch desktops, or set EWMH states such as fullscreen, maximized, sticky, or always-on-top. Its usefulness depends on the window manager implementing the EWMH/NetWM protocol, which standardizes interactions between window managers, pagers, taskbars, applications, and desktop utilities.

Warum Paket-Nerds sich dafür interessieren

wmctrl is package-nerd significant because it is the kind of tiny, stable X11 utility that survives for decades with little upstream activity. It codifies a desktop protocol into one scriptable binary and is still pulled into environments where shell scripts need to reason about graphical windows.

Zeitleiste

• 2003: Initial wmctrl release recorded in the upstream ChangeLog.
• 2005: wmctrl 1.07 released, with additions such as WM_CLASS support, active-window addressing, 64-bit support, and a man page recorded around the same release period.
• 2011: EWMH 1.5 published by freedesktop.org, documenting the protocol family wmctrl targets.
• 2018: Conservatory imported the released wmctrl tarball history into a Git archive because no public upstream VCS was available.

Related projects

• EWMH/NetWM is the freedesktop.org specification that defines the window-manager properties and client messages wmctrl manipulates.
• Zenity is mentioned in the original README as a complementary tool for combining GUI interactions with shell scripts.

Quellen

• https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/wmctrl/
• https://github.com/Conservatory/wmctrl
• https://github.com/Conservatory/wmctrl/blob/master/ChangeLog
• https://packages.debian.org/sid/wmctrl
• https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/wmctrl/wmctrl/fedora-39.html
• https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/latest/