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Accepted
Håkon Hægland
Asked: 2015-04-08 06:33:04 +0800 CST

How to set active tab in gnome-terminal?

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When I open gnome-terminal with multiple tabs from the command line, I would like to preselect (on the command line) which one of the tabs should get focus.

I tried

gnome-terminal --tab -t A --active --tab -t B

to set tab A as the active, but instead tab B becomes the active one.

command-line

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Create the script bellow , make it executable with chmod +x scriptname, where script name is actual script name.

    Run the script with 4 parameters. For example, I run it with activetab.sh TAB-1 TAB-2 TAB-3 TAB-4. You can call tabs anything you want, TAB-1 is just example.

    You will be prompted for which tab you want to focus on, type it exactly as you've typed it in the argument

    Note: you will need to have wmctrl and xdotool installed for this script to work ! sudo apt-get install wmctrl xdotool

    The script

    #!/bin/bash
# Author : Serg Kolo
# Date: April 11,2015
# Description: Open gnome-terminal with 4 tabs, and focus on tab with particular name
#
# set -x
echo "Which window to focus ? "
read FOCUS

gnome-terminal --tab -t $1  --tab -t $2  --tab -t  $3 --tab -t $4

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
    sleep 0.5
    WINID=$(xprop -root | awk '/_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW/ && /0x/ {print $5}' | cut -d'x' -f2)


    while [ $(wmctrl -l | grep $WINID | awk '{print $4}') != $FOCUS ]; do
        xdotool key Ctrl+Page_Up
    done

fi

    Demo

    If you can't see animation bellow, open it in different browser (chromium or google chrome) , or follow this link : http://i.stack.imgur.com/2sWMb.gif

    enter image description here

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