Bring window to the front instead of launching new instance [Archive] - Ubuntu Forums

Bring window to the front instead of launching new instance [Archive] - Ubuntu Forums: "I want a launcher on my panel for Thunderbird (for example). But I want this launcer to check if an instance of Thunderbird is already open on the desktop: if it is open, then I just want to bring that window to the front; otherwise, I want to just launch Thunderbird. These days (with dapper), I think that t-bird just behaves this way without needing to mess around like this. But I'll illustrate with t-bird.

To do this, I first installed wmctrl from the universe repostirories. This is a command-line utility that can list open windows, bring them to the front etc. Then I wrote a script, using wmctrl. Then I created a launcher on the panel, which just runs the script. For thunderbird, the script looked like this (excluding the annotations in blue):

#! /bin/bash

WINTITLE='Mail/News' # Main Thunderbird window has this in titlebar
PROGNAME='mozilla-thunderbird' # This is the name of the binary for t-bird

# Use wmctrl to list all windows, count how many contain WINTITLE,
# and test if that count is non-zero:

if [ `wmctrl -l | grep -c '$WINTITLE'` != 0 ]
then
wmctrl -a '$WINTITLE' # If it exists, bring t-bird window to front
else
$PROGNAME & # Otherwise, just launch t-bird
fi
exit 0


Save this script as 'my-tbird-script' and make it executable. Click on panel, and create a 'Custom Application Launcher ... '. Make the command point to your script. Give it the t-bird icon. Change WINTITLE and PROGNAME to adapt your script to any other application.

As I said, for t-bird this is redundant now, I believe. For gnome-terminal, it is a bit tricky, because the title-bar doesn't have a 'signature' that makes it easily recognizable in the list of windows. You can work around that by changing your default profile in terminal so that the title bar always contains 'Terminal'."