Is there any way to make a hotkey that opens a terminal in floating mode?
I have $mod Mod4 set to open regular terminals (which are tiled/non-floating by default), and would like to have for example $mod+shift Mod4 open a terminal in floating mode.
Here's a worked example of what badboy_ suggested
# Scratchpad terminal.
# https://faq.i3wm.org/question/2420/dropdown-terminal-in-i3/
# Using a custom title string with criteria is deliberate and keeps things simple.
exec --no-startup-id terminator -l KJ -T "Life is beautiful."
for_window [instance="terminator" title="Life"] floating enable, move scratchpad, scratchpad show;
for_window [instance="terminator" title="Life"] resize grow left 300, resize grow right 300, resize grow down 150, resize grow up 100, move scratchpad;
bindsym Menu [instance="terminator" title="Life"] scratchpad show
bindsym Print [instance="terminator" title="Life"] scratchpad showThanks, this worked well. I removed the resize commands, since my terminal seems to have a weird size at startup, but I never restart my machine anyway, so I'll just resize the terminal manually when needed. They should implement a "set size" command, in addition to the resize command.
Thanks Adaephon for the floating enable correction. Regarding the absolute setting of floating window size, see https://faq.i3wm.org/question/3727/how-to-resize-container-to-a-predefined-size/
There are different solutions:
With xterm, roxterm and probably most other gtk-based terminal emulators you can change the class of the window with --class CLASSNAME. Use this to separate between floating and tiled windows:
for_window [class="FXTerm"] floating enable
bindsym $mod+Mod4 exec xterm
bindsym $mod+Shift+Mod4 exec xterm --class FXTerm(This may also work with some other terminal emulators, but probably not with rxvt)
In i3 floating is an attribute that can be attributed to a window only after it has been created. It cannot be passed as parameter to exec and chaining exec and floating enable in a single command is unreliable because of timing issues.
for_window can be used execute commands for a certain windows (depending on their title, class or a few other parameters). Aside from changing the class, you could set a title, but many shell configurations try to change the terminal title, so there could be some timing issues there.
Changing the class has the possible drawback (advantage?) that some X Resources (usually defined in ~/.Xresources or ~/.Xdefaults) may have to be changed to work with the new class.
Asked: May 12 '14
Seen: 1,389 times
Last updated: May 12 '14
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