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josinalvo
Asked: 2019-10-20 12:55:51 +0800 CST

xdotool: moving window "above" 0 0

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As per the title. When I do

xdotool getactivewindow windowmove 0 0 windowsize 1200 $height_first_monitor

xdotool moves the window. But when I do

xdotool getactivewindow windowmove -40 0 windowsize 1200 $height_first_monitor

I get a windowmove: unrecognized option '-40'

Google searches for "xdotool move above 0 0" and "xdotool move negative" and similar did not yield any useful results.

command-line xorg xdotool

1 Answers

  1. This would seem to be a bug, but from so long ago it might now be called a feature. To use negative numbers in certain places you will need to add the end-of-arguments marker --. For example, you can do

    xdotool getactivewindow windowmove 0 -10

    but you need to do

    xdotool getactivewindow windowmove -- -10 0

    This is because windowmove can take optional arguments --sync and --relative, but also (probably for backwards compatibility) the same with a single dash: -sync and -relative. Sadly, -10 is then mistaken for such an (unexpected) argument.

    Looking at the sources for windowmove, you can see it uses the standard C library function getopt_long_only(). This function looks for long arguments that begin -- or -. The alternative getopt_long() would just look for -- long arguments.

    I'm not sure if the above link is to the definitive sources, but this feature seems to be around from before 2010.

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