Manage i3wm workspaces in groups you control
A Python library and set of command line tools for managing i3wm workspaces in groups that you define. I find this tool useful for managing many workspaces in i3.
I often find myself working with many i3 workspaces at once (7-8+), usually related to multiple projects/contexts (personal/work etc). This has caused me a few issues, for example:
Super+1to always switch to the workspace with the email client relevant to my current context.
This has led me to create the i3-workspace-groups project, which enables you to define and manage groups of workspaces, each with their own "namespace", and switch between them.
The scripts can be installed using pip:
python3 -m pip install i3-workspace-groups
Then you should be able to run the command line tool
i3-workspace-groups. There are also a few utility scripts provided that require rofi and which are useful for interactively managing the groups, using rofi as the UI. They include:
i3-assign-workspace-to-group
i3-focus-on-workspace
i3-move-to-workspace
i3-rename-workspace
i3-switch-active-workspace-group
In order to use these tools effectively, commands need to be bound to keybindings. For example, my i3 config contains the following exerts:
set $mod Mod4 set $exec_i3_groups exec --no-startup-id i3-workspace-groups # Switch active workspace group bindsym $mod+g exec --no-startup-id i3-switch-active-workspace-group # Assign workspace to a group bindsym $mod+Shift+g exec --no-startup-id i3-assign-workspace-to-group # Select workspace to focus on bindsym $mod+w exec --no-startup-id i3-focus-on-workspace # Move the focused container to another workspace bindsym $mod+Shift+w exec --no-startup-id i3-move-to-workspace # Rename/renumber workspace. Uses Super+Alt+n bindsym Mod1+Mod4+n exec --no-startup-id i3-rename-workspace bindsym $mod+1 $exec_i3_groups workspace-number 1 bindsym $mod+2 $exec_i3_groups workspace-number 2 bindsym $mod+3 $exec_i3_groups workspace-number 3 bindsym $mod+4 $exec_i3_groups workspace-number 4 bindsym $mod+5 $exec_i3_groups workspace-number 5 bindsym $mod+6 $exec_i3_groups workspace-number 6 bindsym $mod+7 $exec_i3_groups workspace-number 7 bindsym $mod+8 $exec_i3_groups workspace-number 8 bindsym $mod+9 $exec_i3_groups workspace-number 9 bindsym $mod+0 $exec_i3_groups workspace-number 10 bindsym $mod+Shift+1 $exec_i3_groups move-to-number 1 bindsym $mod+Shift+2 $exec_i3_groups move-to-number 2 bindsym $mod+Shift+3 $exec_i3_groups move-to-number 3 bindsym $mod+Shift+4 $exec_i3_groups move-to-number 4 bindsym $mod+Shift+5 $exec_i3_groups move-to-number 5 bindsym $mod+Shift+6 $exec_i3_groups move-to-number 6 bindsym $mod+Shift+7 $exec_i3_groups move-to-number 7 bindsym $mod+Shift+8 $exec_i3_groups move-to-number 8 bindsym $mod+Shift+9 $exec_i3_groups move-to-number 9 bindsym $mod+Shift+0 $exec_i3_groups move-to-number 10 # Switch to previous/next workspace (in all groups). bindsym $mod+p workspace prev bindsym $mod+n workspace next bar { strip_workspace_numbers yes # The rest of your bar config goes below. # ... }
i3-workspace-groups has an optional config file located at
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/i3-workspace-groups/config.toml(defaults to
~/.config/i3-workspace-groups/config.toml). See the default config file for all the possible options to configure, their meaning, and their default values.
The main operations the CLI tool
i3-workspace-groupssupports are:
The tools provided use i3 workspace names to store and read the group for each workspace. For example, if a user assigns the workspace
work, it will be renamed to
work:mail.
NOTE: This walk through assumes that you configured keybindings like the example i3 config.
Say we start with the following workspace names:
1with cat videos from YouTube.
2with a news reader.
3with a photo editor.
4with an email client for work.
An important thing to understand here is that every i3 workspace is always assigned to a single group. And since we haven't assigned any workspace to a group yet, all the workspaces are implicitly in the default group, which is denoted as
.After a few hours of leisure time, you decide to do some work, which requires opening a few windows on a few workspaces. In order to create a new group, first you switch to the workspace
4, and then you press
Super+Shift+g, which will prompt you for a group to assign to the current workspace. You type
workand press enter. Since there's no group named
workyet, the tool will create it and assign the focused workspace to it. You will then notice that the workspace name will change in i3bar to
work:4. Then, you press
Super+gin order to switch the active group. You will be shown a list of existing groups, which will now be
workand . You should now see your workspaces in i3bar ordered as following:
work:4,
1,
2,
3. What happened here? When you switched to the
workgroup, the first thing that the tool did was to move all the workspaces in the work group (only
work:mail) to be in the beginning of the workspace list. Then, it renamed the workspaces in the default group to include the group name, so that they can be differentiated from other workspaces in the
workgroup with the same name.
Then, you decide that you want to open a new terminal window in a new workspace. So you press
Super+2, which will move you to a new workspace named
work:2. Note that although there is already a workspace with the name
2in the default group (now shown as
2in the workspace list), using
Super+2actually takes you to a new empty workspace in the group
work.
After some time working, you become lazy and you want to get back to cat videos, but you promise yourself to get back to work in a few hours, and you don't want to lose your open windows. So you press
Super+gto switch the active work back to the default one. You should now see your workspaces in i3bar ordered as following:
1,
2,
3,
work:4. The focus will also shift to the first workspace in the default group (
1in this case). Now that you're back in the default group, pressing
Super+2will again lead you to the workspace
2in the default group.
The active workspace is the workspace with the lowest number. Typically, this will be the workspace that appears first in the workspace list in i3bar (the leftmost one).
NOTE: In a multi-monitor setup, there is an active workspace per monitor.
NOTE: The active workspace is not necessarily the focused workspace.
The active group is the group of the active workspace. This group will normally contain workspaces related to the task you're doing at the time it's active. When you want to work on another task, you can switch the active group. Workspaces that are not in the active group can still be interacted with, but some commands provided are designed to make it easier to interact with the workspaces of the active group.
NOTE: In a multi-monitor setup, there is an active group per monitor.
The group of the focused workspace.
The group of workspaces that were not assigned to a group by the user. This group is displayed as
. When you start using i3-workspace-groups, none of your current workspaces will be assigned to a group yet, so they will all be in the default group.This project depends on i3ipc for its interaction with i3, so should also work the same on sway. That said, I don't test it on sway and i3 is my main window manager.