einsiedlerspiel / i3-mode

Make emacs and i3wm work together

Introduction

A global minor mode that integrates window movement within and outside of emacs.

The program uses i3-msg/swaymsg to communicate with i3/sway. It may not be compatible with other window manager (although it is possible to adopt it to other window manager that offers command line control).

Highlight:

• Allowing a key to be effective in both emacs and i3.

Installation

Dependencies

xprop if uses i3wm or i3gaps. jq if uses sway.

NOTE: to use i3-mode, emacs must be running in server-mode.

Installation

• use-package and straight.el:

  (use-package i3-mode
    :straight (i3-mode :repo "junyi-hou/i3-mode" :host github
                       :files ("i3-mode.el" "i3-call" "sway-call"))
    :init
    (i3-mode 1))
      

• manual installation: copy i3-mode.el to your load-path and i3-call sway-call to your PATH, then

  (require 'i3-mode)
  (i3-mode 1)
      

The idea

Window managers intercept key events before it can reach emacs. To allow key events go to emacs, I use a simple shell script i3-call~/~sway-call. It first detect whether the focused window is an emacs window or not. If it is an emacs window, the key event is will be sent to emacs.

This trick is useful if one wants to bind keys in both the window manager and emacs. For example, I use C-<hjkl> to move window focus in emacs. And before this package, I use S-<hjkl> to move focus in i3/sway. This is clearly suboptimal for me, as I use two sets of keys to perform essentially the same function. i3-mode allows me to fix this by binding C-<hjkl> in both i3/sway and emacs:

bindsym Control+l exec --no-startup-id i3-call focus right C-l
bindsym Control+h exec --no-startup-id i3-call focus left C-h
bindsym Control+k exec --no-startup-id i3-call focus up C-k
bindsym Control+j exec --no-startup-id i3-call focus down C-j

which instructs i3 to use C+<hjkl> to move focus when the current window is not emacs. Otherwise, i3-call will pass C-<hjkl> to emacs by calling emacsclient -e (i3-integrated-key "C-k" "focus" "up").

Licenses

MIT