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drnessie
Asked: 2011-02-25 06:16:24 +0800 CST

Get Window size in shell

  • 772

I would like to get the size of the current window from a shell script...

Really not much else to say... I would prefer to use wmctrl.

command-line

6 Answers

  1. Best Answer
    wmctrl -lG

    Will give you something like:

    oli@bert:~$ wmctrl -lG
0x0384c0d5 -1 1590 1030 330  170  bert N/A
0x01200023 -1 0    0    3840 1200 bert x-nautilus-desktop
0x01000003 -1 3840 2352 1920 24   bert Bottom Expanded Edge Panel
0x01000028 -1 0    2352 1920 24   bert Bottom Expanded Edge Panel
0x0500003e  0 676  252  1404 1015 bert Chromium
0x02e00021  0 3860 160  1361 1084 bert Liferea
0x02000047  0 6650 940  506  683  bert Social broadcast messages
0x04600004  0 4546 460  1263 833  bert oli@bert: ~

    With this you can grep and cut down on these so you are left with the geometry values (columns 3-6).

    To quote the man page so you understand exactly what the columns are:

    -l

    List the windows being managed by the window manager. One line is output for each window, with the line broken up into space separated columns. The first column always contains the window identity as a hexadecimal integer, and the second column always contains the desktop number (a -1 is used to identify a sticky window). If the -p option is specified the next column will contain the PID for the window as a decimal integer. If the -G option is specified then four integer columns will follow: x-offset, y-offset, width and height. The next column always contains the client machine name. The remainder of the line contains the window title (possibly with multiple spaces in the title).

    • 25

  2. Use xprop or xwininfo. Both come by default, no install necessary

    Usage examples:

    Both commands turn cursor into square/cross to allow selecting a particular window.

    $ xprop _NET_WM_OPAQUE_REGION                                                          
_NET_WM_OPAQUE_REGION(CARDINAL) = 0, 0, 984, 377


$ xwininfo | awk -F ':' '/Width/ || /Height/{print $2}'                         
 984
 377

    Alternatively, one can specify window on command line in XID form

    $ xprop _NET_WM_OPAQUE_REGION -id 83886090                                             
_NET_WM_OPAQUE_REGION(CARDINAL) = 0, 0, 984, 377

$ xwininfo -id 83886090 | awk -F ':' '/Width/ || /Height/{print $2}'            
 984
 377

    Other posts where these were used

    In particular, xwininfo, has been actively used by me for scrips , such as on these AskUbuntu questions:

    • 7

  3. I belive wmctrl does not have any option for finding the active window Id directly.
    If someone knows how to do it, I'm interested to know..
    That said, here are a couple of scripts which print out the active window's size.

    This is: wmctrl + xdotool ...(not using sed). 

    id=$(xdotool getactivewindow)
wmctrl -lpG | while read -a a; do w=${a[0]}; if (($((16#${w:2}))==id)) ; then echo -n "${a[5]} ${a[6]}"; break; fi; done

    This is: xwininfo + xdotool + sed

    xwininfo is part of x11-utils 

    set $(xwininfo -id $(xdotool getactivewindow) \
|sed -n -e "s/^ \+Width: \([0-9]\+\).*/\1/p" \
        -e "s/^ \+Height: \([0-9]\+\).*/\1/p")
echo -n "$1 $2"
    • 5

  4. Shell scripts do not know or care about windows. At best they run in a terminal ( which may or may not be displayed in a window ). If you want to get the width and height of the terminal in characters, use the stty utility.

    • 0

  5. I found tput cols to work quite nicely!

    • 0

  6. Got 3 screens, this output 3 lines with the dimensions:

    xrandr | grep '*' | cut -d'*' -f1 | cut -d ' ' -f4
/* OUTPUT *
* 3840x2160
* 1920x1080
* 1920x1080
***********/
    • 0