[EDIT: nevermind figured out a kludge-around the limitation (by just making links of all the folders directly in my home dir).
I doubt the way I was trying to do it is possible through kwin anyway...?]

I see under the "edit window specific settings" thing that Kwin provides, that you can *match* windows by their titles (exact, regex, or substring), and then use that match to apply certain custom settings...

But I can't find a way to take an individual window and force it to have and keep a custom title.

How can I do this?

If I could only do this manual title setting thing, then I could use it with the "Present Windows" desktop effect to get a workflow that would work *really* well for me....



(For a concrete idea of what I'm trying to do and why:

I have like a couple dozen text editor windows open (Sublime 2, which by default gives a title to its window from the full path/file name of the file in the active tab).

They each have a dozen to a few dozen files open in them, in tabs.

I want to force each window to have a particular name, regardless of which tab in the window has focus.

I want to force them to have names like:

12-noun
13-verb
14-adjective
15-pronoun
16-adverb
17-article
18-preposition
19-conjunction
32-sentypes
33-constituents
34-phrases
35-predicates
36-orderargs
37-clauses
38-negation

(I have a p wide vertical taskbar, so all the window titles are visible there, but of course they're all "~/Dropbox/blahblahrestofthelongpath......")

See, I'm rewriting and reorganizing a p much exhaustive German reference grammar.

That's why I need such a ridiculously huge schmozzle of windows and tabs open at once, and a weird way of organizing and moving between them....)

[Kubuntu 13.10]

xprop -f _NET_WM_NAME 8u -set _NET_WM_NAME "foo is bar"

but that's not a rule nor last forever (the window may set aother title anytime) - maybe still of help

Oh, that's cool! Just enter command with new name, and click on the window just like xkill.

But yeah, the application just rewrites the title whenever you switch to a different tab (in dolphin, firefox, sublime, etc. obviously a really common behavior).

I am so not a leet enough dude to figure out how to hack around that... I mean, I guess you could watch for these renaming events, which come from ? and go to ? and... yeah, I have no idea.

Thanks, though!

there's "xprop -spy", one would call it in a loop and change the title once it updates - would require one running script per window, though.

Aha... I see `xprop -spy` spits out tons of strings for various things that happen in/to the window.

The only one I care about here is:
_NET_WM_ICON_NAME(UTF8_STRING) = "[whatever the new window title is]"
right?

So abstractly, the script I want would be something like this?:

Code: Select all

name_i_want = [accept input]
window_id   = xprop [give me that + mouse icon, and I'll click on a window, and you output the id of the window I clicked on]
loop
   spy_string = [wait for the output of `xprop -spy` to update, then take that]
   if spy_string starts_with( '_NET_WM_ICON_NAME(UTF8_STRING) = ' )
      if not spy_string ends_with( name_i_want )
         xprop [rename the window with window_id to name_i_want]
         # so modify the command `xprop -f _NET_WM_NAME 8u -set _NET_WM_NAME "bluh"` somehow to use an id rather than the + mouse icon?


Uhhhh that's a lot of logical residue. Could you point me towards the real-code I need to replace that with?

Thanks!

something along this should work:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
WANTED="$1"
WINDOW="$2"
while true; do
    xprop -spy _NET_WM_NAME -id "$WINDOW" | { read TITLE;  if [ "$TITLE" != "$WANTED" ]; then
    xprop -f _NET_WM_NAME 8u -set _NET_WM_NAME "$WANTED" -id "$WINDOW"
fi }
done



Code: Select all

$ force_title "foo is bar" 123456


Hey, thanks by the way.

I never used the help you gave me, got busy, and forgot about it until today.

Then I dug up your answer again and wrote a proper script. (I posted it as an answer to someone asking about the same problem here: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/209338/119208 )

Hmm... the spam bots are getting more interesting in their commentary.