[openbox] Hiding some applications from "alt-tab" screen.

[John Russell]

On Fri, 16 Jul 2004 16:23:23 +0200, Bartosz Fenski aka fEnIo
<fenio at o2.pl> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 16, 2004 at 09:40:58AM -0400, John Russell wrote:
> > > I don't want to list it in my ALT-TAB list.
> > > I can always move focus to it by clicking on it, or using some external
> > > tasklist panel at the bottom of the screen (I'm trying to integrate Pogo,
> > > OpenBox and PyPanel).
> > >
> > > Ok, assuming that OpenBox can't do such things now, I've got question if it
> > > is planned to support these features in the near future or not?
> >
> > Devilspie can do this.  Match for xmms and use the skip tasklist
> > action.  I'm pretty sure that will work.
> 
> I've just tried devilspie. Unfortunatelly it doesn't work as I expected.
> Hiding it from tasklist is hiding it from my panel too.
> That's not what I wanted.
> 
> I want to hide it only from ALT+TAB dialog.
> 
> > Judging from other feature
> > requests like this in the past, I highly doubt this sort of thing will
> > make it into openbox.  Devilspie is probably your best bet.
> 
> What a pity... Seems that if devilspie hide some application then nothing
> else could know about it, so both panel and alt+tab dialog box can't
> display it then.
> 
> As far as I read there's no way to hide it only for one application
> (openbox in this case), so it's useless for me.
> 
> If I hide it for every application then after minimizing it, there is no
> way to get it back.
> 
> Unfortunatelly this makes openbox unusable for me. I've got plenty bad
> habits, which will be hard to lose ;)
> 

I usually use wmctrl to get a skipped and minimized application back. 
I have a shell script that runs the program I want that checks to see
if your program is open.  if it is it brings it to your current
desktop and focuses it.  If it isn't running then it opens the
program.I usually map this to a key for a program (emacs is Alt-2) so
whenever I hit Alt-2, if emacs is already running, it comes to me, if
not it starts up.  Hope this helps.

John

#!/bin/sh

PROGRAM="command line for your program"

if ps -eF | grep  "however your program shows up in ps | grep -v grep 
> /dev/null 2>&1; then
    wmctrl -F -R "Window title of you program"
else
    exec "$PROGRAM"
fi