How do I raise window to all workspaces automatically in GNOME2 / metacity?

Question

Let's say I want to run in one workspace

sleep 10 && zenity --warning --text 'Wake up!'

and then I work on other stuffs in a different workspace. How do I get this zenity window pop up in whichever workspace I'm in instead of the original workspace I typed the command in? Or is it easier to have it pop up in all the workspaces?

Answer 1

i haven't found an elegant way to have such a dialogue pop up in all workspaces simultaneously (multiplex), but found after some fiddling around that wmctrl lets you set a windows position, size and (most importantly) to have it raise it on the currently active workspace.

in my specific case i needed this to work also for notifications scheduled through cron and at which requires a slightly different approach as shown in the following shellscript:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
## demo of how to raise a zenity-notification on the active workspace
## license: MIT  copyright: antiplex

export DISPLAY=:0.0

## start wmctrl with a delay in subshell
(sleep 1; wmctrl -r TimedWarning -e 0,40,30,-1,-1; wmctrl -R TimedWarning) &

## launch a zenity dialogue of your choice
zenity --warning --title="TimedWarning" --text="Time is up!" --display=:0.0

for some weird reason, the above script also pulls the terminal-window from which i scheduled the execution to the active workspace when scheduling with at and when the terminal is still open.

here is another variant using the notification daemon / libnotify (check package libnotify-bin on debian-based systems) that won't also raise the terminal on the active workspace:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
## demo of how to raise a non-volatile libnotify-notification 
## on the currently active workspace
## license: MIT  copyright: antiplex

export DISPLAY=:0.0

## critical notifications with expire time 0 need to be manually confirmed
notify-send --expire-time 0 -u critical TimedWarning "Time is up!"

## rename window title as notify-send would name all its windows 'notify-send'
wmctrl -r notify-send -T TimedWarning

## set new position in upper left corner, keeping the windows size
wmctrl -r TimedWarning -e "0,40,30,-1,-1"

## raise window on currently active workspace
wmctrl -R TimedWarning 

Answer 2

I've found a bit better way based on the antiplex's answer:

function alert {
    # https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18880524/how-do-i-raise-window-to-all-workspaces-automatically-in-gnome2-metacity/19990162#19990162
    export DISPLAY=:0.0

    name="TimedWarning"
    text="Time is up!"

    function set-properties() {
        while [ x"$(wmctrl -l | grep -i "$name")" = "x" ] ; do
            sleep 0.001
        done
        wmctrl -r $name -b add,sticky,above
    }
    zenity --warning --title="$name" --text="$text" --display=:0.0 &
    set-properties &
}