Successor of wmctrl, xdotool, devilspie2, kpie

Hello,

with older versions of X11 and XFCE I used tools like wmctrl, xdotool, devilspie2 and kpie mainly to manipulate windows of apps started from scripts. Could somebody point me in the right direction for an up-to-date version that works with Wayland and KDE on a Fedora 37 workstation?

Greetings,
Paddy

Your options will be limited. These valuable tools work on Xorg. This layer of standard is gone now, because different window managers on Wayland implement their own protocols. “Alternatives”, if any, will depend on the desktop environment you use. Just to start some inspiration, I here give my take on this, on Gnome Shell

  • wmctrl: I do not see alternatives in Gnome Shell on Wayland. There is very little opportunity to manipulate windows, although some Gnome Shell extensions have become available that expose some API for window manipulation from the command line. For creating shortcut keys that switch to or launch an application if it is not yet running, I used to rely on jumpapp, which actually uses wmctrl. Currently, on Wayland, I use a Gnome Shell extension, “run-or-raise”.

  • xdotool: where it concerns simulating key presses and mouse clicks, ydotool nicely fills the gap. It is “universal”, because it works at a deeper system level, thus works in each desktop environment on Xorg and Wayland alike. It does not have the window manipulations xdotool has, though.

  • devilspie2: no alternative that I know of, unfortunately.

So from my side, not too much great news unfortunately, although ydotool is a very valuable asset.

I am not familiar with kpie.

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