Yrurtj

How to write a command that would launch an application or if it was already running, would restore the minimized window?

The solution was found.
For me it is:

C=`xdotool search --classname keepassx | tail -1`

if [ -z "$C" ]

then

   keepassx &

else

   xdotool windowactivate --sync $C

fi

With KDE there exists this solution. However this is not a command or script, but using the Graphical KDE Laucher program to review recently used programs and selecting which one you want to reopen.

I have found this relevant AskUbuntu thread. You can use different tools to accomplish your goals.

As user Jacob Vlijm points out you can use wmctrl in conjunction with ps to monitor graphical processes.

Create a cron job that runs every couple of minutes that loops through wmctrl and ps to create a log file. This is an extremely rough example:

#!/bin/bash

wmctrl -lp > /tmp/running.list

awk '{print $3}' /tmp/running.list | sed 's/[^0-9]*//g' > /tmp/pid.list

while read p; do

ps -o cmd= $p > /tmp/process.list

done </tmp/pid.list

This may not work exactly but gives you a rough idea of the kind of script you need to be running. Research a method that works best for you. Continuing on you need to create a script that will reference the results of this cron job as pointed out by user Jacob Vlijm:

Then all we need to do is run a loop with a period of a few seconds, comparing the (unique) list of processes, owning a window (=applications), with the list of a few seconds ago. If a process "left" the list, that's the most recently closed window. In short:

(Conceptual) overview of the loop (python style)

applications1 = get_applications()

while True:

    time.sleep(3)

    applications2 = get_applications()

    closed = [app for app in applications1 if not app in applications2]

if closed:

    most_recent = closed[0]

    # store the process in a file, to be available to run as most recently closed

    open(f, "wt").write(most_recent)

application1 = application2

where f is the path to a file where the most recent application is written to. Subsequently have another process/command start the application in the file and the setup is completed.

This script, (python or bash or whatever) needs to reference the file that we create using the cron job and you need to add a line to launch the recently closed application. You can then create a hotkey that references this script and viola! You now can instantly open the most recently closed graphical application. This can be expanded to any process or service but that is beyond the scope of your question.