i3wsr
is a small program that uses I3's IPC Interface
to change the name of a workspace based on its contents.
The chosen name for a workspace is a composite of the WM_CLASS
X11 window
property for each window in a workspace. In action it would look something like this:
Rust, and Cargo is
required, and i3wsr
can be installed using cargo like so:
cargo install i3wsr
Or alternatively, you can build a release binary,
cargo build --release
Then place the built binary, located at target/release/i3wsr
, somewhere on your $path
.
If you're running Arch you can install either stable, or latest from AUR thanks to reddit user u/OniTux.
Just launch the program and it'll listen for events if you are running I3. Another option is to put something like this in your i3 config
# cargo
exec_always --no-startup-id $HOME/.cargo/bin/i3wsr
# AUR
exec_always --no-startup-id /usr/bin/i3wsr
You can configure icons for the respective classes, a very basic preset for font-awesome is configured, to enable it use the option --icons awesome
(requires font-awesome to be installed).
If you have icons and don't want the names to be displayed, you can use the --no-names
flag.
For further customization, use the --config path_to_file.toml
option. The toml
file has to fields, icons
to assign icons to classes, and aliases
to assign alternative names to be displayed.
Example config can be found in assets/example_config.toml
[icons]
# font awesome
TelegramDesktop = ""
Firefox = ""
Alacritty = ""
Thunderbird = ""
# smile emoji
MyNiceProgram = "😛"
[aliases]
TelegramDesktop = "Telegram"
"Org.gnome.Nautilus" = "Nautilus"
[general]
seperator = ""
For an overview of available options
$ i3wsr -h
i3wsr - i3 workspace renamer 1.2.0
Daniel Berg <mail@roosta.sh>
USAGE:
i3wsr [FLAGS] [OPTIONS]
FLAGS:
-h, --help Prints help information
--no-names Set to no to display only icons (if available)
-V, --version Prints version information
OPTIONS:
-c, --config <config> Path to toml config file
--icons <icons> Sets icons to be used [possible values: awesome]
This program depends on numbered workspaces, since we're constantly changing the workspace name. So your I3 configuration need to reflect this:
bindsym $mod+1 workspace number 1
If you're like me and don't necessarily bind your workspaces to only numbers, or you want to keep a part of the name constant you can do like this:
bindsym $mod+q workspace number 1:[Q]
This way the workspace would look something like this when it gets changed:
1:[Q] Emacs|Firefox
You can take this a bit further by using a bar that trims the workspace number and be left with only
[Q] Emacs|Firefox
To run the tests Xvfb
needs to be installed and run:
Xvfb :99.0
This sets up a headless x server running on DISPLAY :99.0, then some apps needs to be run in this new server:
env DISPLAY=:99.0 gpick
env DISPLAY=:99.0 i3 -c /etc/i3/config
refer to .travis.yml for a CI example
This program would not be possible without i3ipc-rs, a rust library for controlling i3-wm through its IPC interface and rust-xcb, a set of rust bindings and wrappers for XCB.