For example, when opening PDFs from Thunderbird, they just go to existing Adobe Reader instance. Which could already be sitting in some other workspace, but I usually don't remember where.
Awesome lets you right-click the menubar and get a list of all windows on all workspaces. Something like that would be nice.
Have a look at the winmenu example of a python IPC library, i3-py. It makes use of dmenu to select a particular window, and jumps to it.
EDIT: Since most will not scroll down: i3-py is depreciated. Use TonyC's python bindings + solution, or rofi.
IMHO rofi is currently the most convenient solution. See also this answer.
While the freedom to create complicated layouts and make full use of workspaces is a great strength of i3wm, it's probably the only window manager out there where it's quite easy to lose a window if you aren't paying attention.
Try i3-container-commander from the i3ipc-python project. It is a dmenu-based script that lets you drill down into your open windows based on class and title.
If you're looking for a way to list all windows apps and then switch to any of them, you may be interested in dmenu-i3-window-jumper, a sh script (no python nor bash required) who just do that.
Why don't you assign all pdf readers (adobe in your case) to the "pdf" workspace?
You can solve that with a script using the IPC interface. See http://i3wm.org/docs/ipc.html. It certainly won’t be introduced as a feature in i3 itself :).
In general, I’d recommend not using apps which don’t properly behave, like Adobe Reader. There are plenty more PDF readers out there which are FOSS and open one window per PDF, so that you won’t have that specific problem anymore.
Just ran across simpleswitcher, which does exactly what it needs to do. It asks the available windows directly from Xorg, which happens to be a lot faster than i3-py / IPC.
Arch-users can try it without thinking with AUR.
Edit: Should test stuff a bit longer before telling about it. What works is to get a list of open windows on the current workspace, when asking for open windows on all workspaces. Using it to find on which workspace an app is buried, does not work. simpleswitcher relies on some EWM-Hints that are as yet not implemented in i3, and they are according to Michael not trivial to implement.
EDIT2: Here is a fork that has support for i3. It works really well. Archers: The AUR you should install is simpleswitcher-dd-git.
EDIT3: The Fork has been renamed to rofi. It is excellent!
Run or focus in i3https://faq.i3wm.org/question/2473/ru...
My solution >blush< https://faq.i3wm.org/question/2473/ru...
Type a string and the corresponding program is brought into focus; if it is already running focus moves to its associated workspace, otherwise it is launched in the current workspace.
Asked: 2012-07-08 20:26:57 +0000
Seen: 4,933 times
Last updated: Jun 08
Copyright i3, 2012 Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.
