Wmctrl does not recognise terminals

Hi there,

wmctrl -l returns the list of my windows, but omits any terminal - xterm, console, alacritty or terminator.

Thank you in advance :slight_smile:
Davide

I don’t know this program but apparently it has troubles listing some apps in wayland, are you using wayland?

I know there are problems in Wayland, but I actually use xorg

This was my initial thought as well, but wmctrl would presumably fail to interact with wayland windows on wayland, not X windows. Given xterm doesn’t work that’s probably not the problem?

That said, that stackexchange post makes me wonder. Exact same symptom, except the user says they’re using wayland, and the problem goes away when they don’t use wayland. Wayland also limits the information that applications are allowed to see, so perhaps X windows are the ones that are indiscriminately anonymized.

@dav.dap, hate to ask you the same thing repeatedly, but why do you think you’re using wayland? Both Gnome and KDE run on wayland by default these days (without any visual changes), and some NixOS options that mention xserver actually configure wayland. So I could see someone getting confused about this.

Oh my god I believed I was on xorg but I was actually on wayland! Changing from wayland to xorg on login fixed the issue.

Sorry for not thinking about that before, and thank you for asking again!

Davide

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Oh KDE uses wayland by default now? I thought it was reverted to use x11 by default (i was also confused by that at some points), but maybe wayland is default now.

D on’ t know - I use gnome

Huh, apparently not: Plasma/Wayland Known Significant Issues - KDE Community Wiki

My bad, I probably missed the news about them going back on that change.

I was referring to the status in NixOs and notably this message and linked PR Wayland by default now on KDE (??) + clock broken · Issue #143272 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub

Edit Note that on master the modifications made by the above PR are not here anymore, so I’m not sure what is the default status in NixOs ^^