xdotool cheatsheet

February 6, 2021 - 1 min read

Tools

I played a lot these days with xdotool, to try to automate some stuff for my Elgato Streamdeck.

These are the things I try to do:

Select a window, and send a Keyboard sequence (such as CTRL+B to mute/unmute a Teams call)
Type emojis to the active window 😅
More a window around, or resize it

Here are some links that I found about xdotool:

Below are the commands I found useful during my research.

get window classes

xprop | grep 'CLASS'

Click on the window you want to analyse after that.

More details about classes on this thread: xdotool: what are “class” and “classname” for a window?

find active window

xdotool getactivewindow

find a window by class

xdotool search --onlyvisible --limit 1 --class "Firefox"

focus a window

xdotool windowactivate 123456

send a key

xdotool search --onlyvisible --limit 1 --class "Firefox" key ctrl+t

send a key to firefox (by changing active window and come back)

ACTIVE_WINDOW=$(xdotool getactivewindow)
FIREFOX_WINDOW=$(xdotool search --onlyvisible --limit 1 --class "Firefox")
xdotool windowactivate $FIREFOX_WINDOW
xdotool key ctrl+s
xdotool windowactivate $ACTIVE_WINDOW

change a window size

xdotool search --onlyvisible --limit 1 --class "Firefox" windowsize 800 600