Generate Workspace Names from Criteria

ANOKNUSA
536 ●3 ●11 ●20

Is it possible to generate workspace names on-the-fly using window criteria? Something akin to

i3-msg move container to workspace [class]

Obviously that syntax doesn't work, but it illustrates the idea. I've looked over the User's Guide, and there doesn't seem to be a way to do it built into i3's standard controls. Is it possible using the IPC, however? The desired outcome is to use a single keystroke to send certain windows to their own unique workspaces.

answered May 28 '14

ANOKNUSA
536 ●3 ●11 ●20

updated Jul 15 '14

Inspired by an answer in this thread, I just slapped together a quick fix in Bash that does the trick. It uses xdotool to get the WINDOW_NAME variable of the currently focused window and passes it to i3-msg. Just give it a keybinding in the config file.

#!/usr/bin/bash
#
# Use xdotool to get the WINDOW_NAME of the focused window and pass it to
# i3-msg, moving the focused window to a unique workspace

function getinfo {
xdotool getwindowname $(xdotool getwindowfocus)
}

i3-msg "move window to workspace $( getinfo )"

EDIT: Thanks to GitHub user yiuin, I've come up with a way to do this that's simpler (doesn't require xdotool) and more versatile (the user can control the names of workspaces/labels) using two scripts found in yiuin's repository. My GitHub repository contains two scripts for this---shelve and pull. shelve uses i3-msg and dmenu to apply a mark to a container and move it to a workspace named after the mark. pull then does this in reverse, listing marked containers and pulling the selected container to the currently focused workspace.

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Generate Workspace Names from Criteria

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