acganesh / i3-mws

Master workspaces for i3, because sometimes 10 workspaces is not enough.

i3-mws: 100 workspaces on i3

What it does

• It extends the standard i3 workspaces to have 100 workspaces, addressable using separate mod keys: 10 "master" workspaces (controlled by one mod key) with 10 child workspaces each (controlled by the normal mod key).
  • For instance, general purpose containers can be kept in the master workspace 1, and each major concurrent project can have its own set of 10 workspaces; instead of having to divide multiple projects and browser instances across only ten workspaces.
  • $mod+# switches to child workspace # under the current master workspace (same as in normal i3 operation).
  • $mod2+# switches to master workspace #, remembering the last child workspace used in that master workspace.
  • $mod+Shift+# moves the current container to child workspace #, also much like standard i3.
  • $mod2+Shift+# moves the current container to master workspace #, preserving the child workspace number (probably rare in practice).
• Whenever an external monitor gets connected or disconnected, it remembers what output each workspace was in, and moves it back when it gets reconnected.
  • Due to quirks in the author's implementation of multi-monitor, this might need tweaking to work on other systems, but is probably fine, and can be disabled.

Installation

Only required library is json-c, but it was picked because it seemingly was already installed in the system, including header files, so odds are nothing needs to be installed.

Steps:

1. Clone the repo.
2. If using the option to remember workspace location in multi-monitor setups (recommended, if it works), uncomment #define MULTI_SCREEN at the top of mws-server.c, and set the name of your xrandr outputs in the WORKSPACES array.
3. make && make install
4. Modify your i3 config, as in the file i3_config_changes. Remember to remove or comment out the existing bindsyms that deal with workspaces. Remember to add strip_workspace_numbers yes to the bar {} config, besides the key bindings.
5. Restart i3 or, for good measure, reboot/exit and log back in.

Internals

Hopefully this is not necessary to get it to work, but in case it helps with debugging:

• If using named workspaces, i3 only sorts based on the first character, and thus the workspaces would appear out of order. i3-wms has a numbered prefix followed by the actual string; for instance, workspace 2.1 is actually 21:2.1 internally.
• To minimize latency—unclear if it would actually matter—it's written in C, and it uses a UNIX socket started by mws-server that mws-client (called by the keybindings) talks to. mws-server additionally talks to the i3 IPC server to receive notifications of user-changed workspace focus (e.g. scrolling on the status bar). The implications of this, together with the fact it was meant to be a quick script, are that the code doesn't look too great.