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sindresorhus / get-windows

Get metadata about the active window and open windows (title, id, bounds, owner, etc)
MIT License
805 stars 169 forks source link

Silently fails under Linux if xwininfo/xprop is missing #75

Open QbDesu opened 4 years ago

QbDesu commented 4 years ago

Fails without further notice if xprop or xwininfo because they are either not installed, or not present in the PATH variable. If you ask me the promise should fail with a proper error when something fails (or throw an Error for the sync variant). The current behaviour makes debugging the root of the problem quite difficult.

https://github.com/sindresorhus/active-win/blob/430e6efc02823c1b04331a987012a519c360ab23/lib/linux.js#L109-L111

Also you might want to add that there is no Wayland support at the moment to the documentation especially considering the increasing popularity of Wayland.

I might PR this myself when I find the time.

sindresorhus commented 4 years ago

I don’t use or have Linux, but a PR is welcome to improve the behavior.

tkainrad commented 3 years ago

The ActivityWatch project has a similar problem with Wayland: https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch/issues/92

So far, they seem to have found a workaround for Gnome.

This shell command can retrieve the active Window application name for Wayland + Gnome:

gdbus call -e -d org.gnome.Shell -o /org/gnome/Shell -m org.gnome.Shell.Eval global.get_window_actors\(\)[`gdbus call -e -d org.gnome.Shell -o /org/gnome/Shell -m org.gnome.Shell.Eval global.get_window_actors\(\).findIndex\(a\=\>a.meta_window.has_focus\(\)===true\) | cut -d"'" -f 2`].get_meta_window\(\).get_wm_class\(\) | cut -d'"' -f 2

If there are no other options, this might be an approach to support a large portion of Wayland users.

binyamin commented 2 years ago

@sindresorhus I can confirm that, on Wayland, this is impossible by design. It's a security measure, meant to prevent windows from spying on each other. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4546501

PR incoming :smiley:

@tkainrad According to this StackExchange answer, Gnome 41 doesn't allow that workaround anymore.

accerqueira commented 2 years ago

Although Wayland doesn't support EWMH/ICCCM by design, Wayland compositors may provide equivalent functionality, like wlr-foreign-toplevel-management. This might inspire a future PR: https://github.com/activitywatch/aw-watcher-window-wayland