Window Search Provider

Find your current open windows with gnome shell search :)

This is something I ever wanted to have again since I used compiz' windows matching in expose mode.

So here it is: You can search current open windows using gnome search. Type windows key, then start typing to find your window. It will fuzzy-match application name and window title like you might know from Sublime Text or Atom. Current algorithm does not yet order the matches by best score.

If you start your search with a "/", it will interprete all search terms (separated by whitespace) as regular expressions, which have to match all.

This extension was inspired by https://github.com/daniellandau/switcher/

Features

• Fuzzy match current open windows and activate selected

• Match current open windows with a regex starting search term with "/" (spaces are substituted with ".*?") and activate selected

• Start a search with !x and whitespace, then either fuzzy match or match regex to close all selected windows.

  Example: "!x specsu" to close all windows labelled "Spec Suite". I tend to leave many atom package test windows open. So this is a killer feature ;)

• End a search with "!x" to close all selected windows. (using feature above showed me, that I intuitively first selected windows to close, then had to edit the search text)

  Example: "specsu!x" to close all windows labelled "Spec Suite".

• A "!" or "/" at end of a search string is ignored, if you have a "!" or "/" in your search term (other than describe above), it is part of search term as expected.

• A "!" (or "/") + number like "!2" or "/2" at end of your search term will select the second matched window from list.

  Example: "code/2" will select the second window matching "code". This makes the search also more unique, such that you can simply hit return for activating the window.

• I found "/" at end of windows faster to type than "!", so you can use both chars at end of string for options.

Preferences

Preferences file is read, whenever you enable the extension.

There is some rudimentary preference support now. For simplicity, this reads prefs from a JSON file prefs.json in following order. The first existing is taken:

• ~/.config/gnome-shell-window-search-provider/prefs.json
• <EXTENSION_DIR>/prefs.json

What you can configure:

{
  "searchPrefix": ["kw", "p"],
  "useAppInfo": true,
  "debug": false
}

• searchPrefix is either a string or a list of strings, specifying optional prefixes to boost your window search over application results. The prefix will not be considered in searches.

• useAppInfo - (this did not work in Gnome 40) if off, results displayed like application search results, if on, results are displayed like other search results (with more info)

• debug - Display very verbose logging in journalctl /usr/bin/gnome-shell

Installation

You can install this extension from https://extensions.gnome.org or simply clone this repository into your extension folder:

  $ cd ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions
  $ git clone https://github.com/klorenz/gnome-shell-window-search-provider.git [email protected]
  $ gnome-shell-extension-tool -e "window-search-provider"

You can also download a zip of this repo and install using Gnome Tweak Tool.

Screenshots

Match all windows containing (case insensitive) characters "e" "x" "t" "a" and "t" in that order:

Match all windows matching "ext" and "at" regular expressions: