glepretre / switch-monitor

move window to monitor with keyboard shortcut in X

About

This is a small bash script to move a window between monitors on a distro with the X Window System.

For some reason, in a number of distros, there is no built-in way to configure a keyboard shortcut to move a window from one monitor to another.

In Mint, there are keyboard shortcut options for moving to an edge, which can be used to to move non-maximized window to the left edge of the left-most monitor or right edge of the right-most monitor. However, there are limitations to this approach.

There are other scripts floating around, but I have not found one that works quite right with F11 fullscreen (as opposed to maximized) windows, nor one that supports three or more monitors. Also, this script should detect (horizontal) monitor sizes and left-right order for you.

Usage

Running the script with no arguments will move the current window to the right. Running it with a positive or negative integer argument will move it right or left by so many monitors:

./switch-monitor.sh -3

Install

To install, place the script in a desired location, make sure it's executable:

chmod +x switch-monitor.sh

Then edit Keyboard Settings > Keyboard Shortcuts and add a custom shortcut that executes this script upon the desired keypressing, either by supplying an absolute path to the script or by putting the script on your PATH. I use Ctrl+m. If you have more than one monitor and would like to move it in more than one direction, you could set up an alternate keypressing for the command "switch-monitor.sh -1".

Dependencies

This script uses xdotool, wmctrl, xwininfo, and xprop. In Mint and Ubuntu, you'll probably only need to install xdotool. In other distros you may need to install others.