FreeBSD desktop: pause any application

After using UNIX for so many years I knew that I could freeze (or pause) any process in the system with kill -17 (SIGSTOP) signal and then unfreeze it with with kill -19 (SIGCONT) signal as I described in the Process Management section of the Ghost in the Shell - Part 2 article. Doing it that way for the desktop applications is PITA to say the least. Can you imagine opening xterm terminal and searching for all Chromium or Firefox processes and then freezing them one by one every time you need it? Me neither.Fortunately with introduction of so called X11 helper utilities - like xdotool(1) - it is now possible to implement it in more usable manner.Today I will show you how to freeze any X11 application with single keyboard shortcut or mouse gesture if you utilize them in any way with small simple script.

Handy little trick. The entire series of articles by the same author about FreeBSD on the desktop are interesting and informative reads.