Resizing a maximized window from the command line

I got the answer here.

this would be the script to maximize it to the right half of the screen:

#!/bin/bash
# resizes the window to full height and 50% width and moves into upper right corner

#define the height in px of the top system-bar:
TOPMARGIN=27

#sum in px of all horizontal borders:
RIGHTMARGIN=10

# get width of screen and height of screen
SCREEN_WIDTH=$(xwininfo -root | awk '$1=="Width:" {print $2}')
SCREEN_HEIGHT=$(xwininfo -root | awk '$1=="Height:" {print $2}')

# new width and height
W=$(( $SCREEN_WIDTH / 2 - $RIGHTMARGIN ))
H=$(( $SCREEN_HEIGHT - 2 * $TOPMARGIN ))

# X, change to move left or right:

# moving to the right half of the screen:
X=$(( $SCREEN_WIDTH / 2 ))
# moving to the left:
#X=0; 

Y=$TOPMARGIN

wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -b remove,maximized_vert,maximized_horz && wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -e 0,$X,$Y,$W,$H

To move to the left, just change the X-Line to X=0. (If you use Ubuntu Unity, you need to adapt RIGHTMARGIN too I use RIGHTMARGIN=102)

defining the right margins this solves the bug, that the second time you call it, it moved to the very top of the screen, ignoring the top-toolbar.

I think xdotool getactivewindow is what you want - did you try it?

It prints the window id (from the window stack) if there are no further xdotool subcommands on the command line.

In xdotool getactivewindow getwindowpid for example, getactivewindow puts the id on the window stack, and getwindowpid uses this id to query the PID. Note that running that command in the terminal will always return the ID of the terminal window, because it is active. In order to get the ID from another window try sleep 2s && xdotool getactivewindow and select the window of interest in the two seconds time span.

There is a complication when using xdotool with other tools for window handling:

While xdotool output uses decimal numbers for windwo ids, most other tools use hexadecimal numbers for output (they support both for input usually).

For example, if you find a window with xdotool getactivewindow, you will not find the result in the output of xwininfo -root -tree, that lists all windows. It needs to be converted to a hexadecimal number first:

$ xdotool getactivewindow                              
69206716
$ printf 0x%x 69206716                  
0x42002bc
$ xwininfo -root -tree | grep 0x42002bc
           0x42002bc (has no name): ("konsole" "Konsole")  1154x781+0+0  +1289+498

Converting decimal to hexadecimal:

printf 0x%x 69206716

Converting hexadecimal to decimal:

printf %i 0x42002bc