restore minimized applications with launchers

[kfrancist]

i'd like to be able to restore minimized applications by clicking on their launchers like you can do when you have awn or dockey installed. but i'd rather not install awn or dockey since this is the only feature i want from them that the gnome panel doesn't already provide.

i found this thread:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2356588

which is from 2007. apparently a small application, "launcher-restore", was written to give program launchers the functionality i'm talking about--but that program is gone now--the attached deb file doesn't work at all.

so is there some other program that will do this now, a newer version of launcher-restore, or some even simpler way of setting things up the way i want them?

[Linye]

dockbarx has that behavior.

[stinkeye]

wmctrl allows you to do various window manager actions from the command line.
A useful feature is "wmctrl -a <str>", which will switch to a window containing the string <str> in the title.
For example, to activate a firefox window, and start firefox if there is no such window, use the following command as a launcher:

wmctrl -a Firefox || firefox


To install wmctrl

sudo apt-get install wmctrl

I can't get the command to work from a launcher in the panel
but if you make a script and link to it in the launcher it works
eg for firefox

#!/bin/bash
wmctrl -a Firefox || firefox

Then the command box in the launcher will look something like this
with the path to your script

sh /home/glen/startff
If you precede the path to your script with sh there is no need to make the script executable.

[kfrancist]

thanks to both of you! these both seem like good options. i'm sure one will suffice. problem solved!

[mujahied]

hmmm good this even solved my problem thanks man