I'm wanting to be able to check if a particular application is visible to the user. Is there an application that can check that and return the result? I've been doing some searching on google and the closest I've found is this (which is pygtk)....however this is to check an applications own visibility, not another applications visibility. Any help or direction much appreciated. I'm wanting something that can return the visibility status of any application...

To check if a gtk.Window is visible you can use the visible property inherited from gtk.Widget.

self.window =3D gtk.Window()
self.window.show()
self.window.get_property("visible")

Not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean you want to check if the particular app has focus on the desktop?

I think so. Basically I'm wanting to check if a screensaver or some other full screen application is running (a game, screensaver or some other full screen app)...

I see. I have never heard of an app that does this, but that doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't exist
I don't even know what sort of term you could use to search for something like that?

Have a look at "xlswins", it will give you a list of all X server windows and "xwininfo -id win_id" that give some information about a window, including its "map state" that shows if the window is viewable or not.

Yes I did test out the xwininfo 'Map State' thing...unfortunately a window is shown as 'IsVisible' even if it's not visible (ie hidden behind another app or window).

I don't think the X server store layer information, the window manager does so you may want to interact with it/patch it to retrieve that information.

How would you handle transparent overlapping windows by the way ?

This is getting very complicated.

I don't really care about other open applications that are windowed, even if they do cover my application. I'm just concerned with pausing (sleeping) my application if a full screen game or screen saver is started.

I guess you should be able to detect a full screen game by parsing "xlswins -l" output for full-screen windows, remove the root window and any window not viewable.

Concerning the screen-savers, they normally lock the display, so any X11 connection will be refused as long as they are running, easy for you to detect them so.

Thanks for your help on this. I've figured out I can do it all with xwininfo in the same way you suggested above.

Thanks again for your time.