Goran
53 ●6 ●6 ●12

So my main concern is that the language used for .config is not a real scripting language but some sort of English dialect. Like those jokes about people trying to talk with the shell in pure English :). Then again that is not a trivial matter to program and Michael said he is not going in that direction and they also moved to a home made informative parser, which is nice I guess.

So what is left for me to do? I want to fell the tree structure with my keyboard and adjust it accordingly. First of how do I now if a command passed to i3-msg executed successively all I get is [{"success":true}]? What sort of information i3 output's to me? I need to be able to query stuff.

So I saw that i3-msg has some functionality like printing the tree structure and workspaces , outputs and similar but what should I do with this? I guess the tree is stored somewhere in some file and that I need to adjust it by changing that file "manually" ??? In that case I would really need more powerful robust commands instead of doing it by hand or implementing my own function's (aka plugin).

In the end it would be best if there was a nice scripting language for i3 so that users can make there own UI and workflow and developers job wold be to provide the user with robust and powerful function's

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answered Jan 18 '13

Michael
3081 ●13 ●28 ●50 http://i3wm.org/

I think you are looking for http://i3wm.org/docs/ipc.html which documents what is possible and how it’s done, both on the wire and referring to libraries in various languages (e.g. i3-py).

I just want to comment specifically on your last paragraph:

In the end it would be best if there was a nice scripting language for i3 so that users can make there own UI and workflow and developers job wold be to provide the user with robust and powerful function's

I disagree. i3 aims to provide a usable window manager, not a framework for writing your own window manager. If you don’t find i3 usable as-is, you should go look elsewhere. Have a look at awesome, XMonad, wmfs, etc…

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Michale tnx for the replay. The problem with your last remark is that neither of mentioned window managers has a simple scripting language :). Just one question. If you "easily" could make it a 'framework' as you say. Would you do it ?

Goran (Jan 18 '13)edit

The problem with creating such a framework is that it is not easy ;-). You have to think of _a lot_ of cases and essentially provide the user with a higher level of abstraction than talking to X11 directly. I think most users would not care for such a framework.

Michael (Jan 18 '13)edit

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scripting i3. How ?

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