FVWM: Selecting a window by name from the keyboard?

[Chris Siebenmann]

What I would like to be able to do is select a window from the keyboard
in a way very similar to searching for text in a browser: hit a key
combination, start typing the name of a window (maybe with some sort of
tab completion), and then when enough of the name has been typed, hit
return to deiconify and focus on the window.

I can see how to do this with some external tools that I have lying
around[*], but I was wondering if there's already some obvious and
straightforward way to do this in fvwm that I should be using instead.

Thanks in advance (and my apologies if this is a common question).

(For my purposes I don't care which window is picked if the name is
not unique. If there are four windows named 'local', either any one
of them will do or it's my fault.)

- cks
[*: dmenu, http://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/, will let you autocomplete
text selections from a big list that you feed to it on standard
input and dump the result to standard output. So I'm planning to
wrap it in a script that feeds it a list of window names obtained
from somewhere, then use, eg, FvwmCommand to tell fvwm to Focus
whatever is the selected window name.]

[Thomas Adam]

Post by Chris Siebenmann
What I would like to be able to do is select a window from the keyboard
in a way very similar to searching for text in a browser: hit a key
combination, start typing the name of a window (maybe with some sort of

Yes, this has been done with dmenu in the past (by me, as it happens) -- but
it was just a proof of concept.

What you'd need to do is get FVWM to dump the window ring (with suitable
conditions) to a file and have dmenu read the contents of that in:

All (CurrentPage, AcceptsFocus, ...) PipeRead `... > /some/file`

But this forces you to then use FvwmCommand which is never good for this
sort of thing.

Making this a module (perhaps expanding FvwmWindowMenu) is something I've
also tried before, and it works quite well. This then doesn't need
FvwmCommand or dmenu, and becomes just another way of finding windows.

-- Thomas Adam