Switch to an application using its PID

Question

I'm using Gnome. In vim, I want to map a key to switch to Firefox. I know that I should use bash commands (a command in form of !...). Is it possible to switch to an application using its PID?

Answer 1

The first two examples will activate the first listed Firefox window, based on its Title. Firefox always ends its Title-bar with "Mozilla Firefox"... "listed" means: as listed by wmctrl querying X. The first example uses a fuzzy match for the title.

wmctrl -a "Mozilla Firefox"

Or, to get the title more specifically:

wmctrl -Fa "$(wmctrl -l | sed -rn 's/^([^ ]+ +){3}(.*Mozilla Firefox)$/\2/p')"

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If you know the PID of the process behind a window, you can use this command:

wmctrl -ia $(wmctrl -lp | awk -vpid=$PID '$3==pid {print $1; exit}')