i3gem: an i3wm Grouping Manager

When working on multiple projects, you may find that you have tens of workspaces over multiple monitors. Switching between projects requires moving to all of the monitors and

i3-groups lets you group workspaces and cycle between workspaces within a group.

Concepts:

At all times there exists an active group, and all monitors show workspaces from the same group. Changing the group switches the workspace on all monitors to that group.

Installation

Commands:

make-workspace: Creates a new workspace in this group and changes focus to it.

rename-workspace: Changes the name of the focused workspace. Opens a rofi menu if no name is passed.

move-container-to-ws: Moves container to specified workspace and group, but keeps focus on current workspace.

move-ws-to-group: Moves workspace (and all containers in it) to a chosen group, but keeps focus on the workspace.

change-active-group: Changes active group, forces all monitors to select a workspace from that group with a matching monitor. Creates new workspaces on montitors that don't have a matching group.

next-ws-in-group: Goes to next workspace in the group. If more than n seconds are spent in the new workspace, puts the new workspace at the top of the workspace order.

goto-special-workspace(): Focuses on one of the special workspaces that have a group named shared. The active group and the workspace order are not modified. Switching to the next workspace will ignore shared workspaces.

i3-groups-polybar: Serves as a replacement for Polybar's i3 module. Outputs text that can be fed into a polybar script module shown below. Displays separate lists of groups, and list of workspaces in the active group. Highlights active group and focused workspace.

Example i3 config

bindsym $mod+n exec next-ws-in-group
bindsym $mod+p exec next-ws-in-group --prev bindsym $mod+r exec rename-workspace bindsym $mod+Shift+r exec move-container-to-ws bindsym $mod+g exec change-active-group bindsym $mod+Shift+g exec move-ws-to-group bindsym $mod+Shift+w exec make-workspace bindsym $mod+a exec goto-shared-ws --key broswer bindsym $mod+s exec goto-shared-ws --key roam

Polybar module

[module/main_i3]
type = custom/script
exec = i3-groups-polybar -m {xrandr_output}
tail = true

TODO:

• Allow canceling actions
• Remove special case for shared workspaces
• Print other groups in grey
• Fix issue where shared appears on only one desktop
• Fix i3.subscribe encoding error
• Autoname workspaces
• Have floating workspaces?
• When an urgent workspace exists, highlight it or it's group if it's group is not currently active