Switch to an application using its PID

Question

I'm using Gnome. In vim, I want to map a key to switch to Firefox. I know that I should use bash commands (a command in form of !...). Is it possible to switch to an application using its PID?

Solution

The first two examples will activate the first listed Firefox window, based on its Title. Firefox always ends its Title-bar with "Mozilla Firefox"... "listed" means: as listed by wmctrl querying X. The first example uses a fuzzy match for the title.

wmctrl -a "Mozilla Firefox"

Or, to get the title more specifically:

wmctrl -Fa "$(wmctrl -l | sed -rn 's/^([^ ]+ +){3}(.*Mozilla Firefox)$/\2/p')"

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If you know the PID of the process behind a window, you can use this command:

wmctrl -ia $(wmctrl -lp | awk -vpid=$PID '$3==pid {print $1; exit}') 

Comments

[bahamat]

So, in X terms, you want to raise and focus a window from a shell?

[sunnysideup]

You probably need to get the x window id from the pid and send a _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW message afterwards