The fastest and easiest way is to save the intended layout and restore it when needed on a fresh workspace. (Since version 4.8 i3 can save and restore layouts (see here)
Luckily with gnome-terminal you can set the window role with a command line parameter: --role ROLE, which makes it quite easy to assign specific positions for specific windows.
To start your terminals you can just use the following script and run it on an empty workspace:
#!/bin/bash
WS_LAYOUT_FILE=/some/where/layout
declare -A IPs
IPs=(
[W1]=xx.xx.xx.01
[W2]=xx.xx.xx.02
[W3]=xx.xx.xx.03
[W4]=xx.xx.xx.04
[W5]=xx.xx.xx.05
[W6]=xx.xx.xx.06
)
SSH_USER=username
i3-msg append_layout "$WS_LAYOUT_FILE"
for window in ${!IPs[*]};
do
gnome-terminal --role "$window" -e "ssh $SSH_USER@${IPs[$window)}" &
done
The layout file (/some/where/layout in the example) for your case looks like this:
{
"border": "normal", "floating": "auto_off",
"layout": "splith", "type": "workspace",
"nodes": [
{
"border": "normal", "floating": "auto_off",
"layout": "splitv", "percent": 0.333333333333333, "type": "con",
"nodes": [
{
"border": "normal", "floating": "auto_off",
"layout": "splitv", "percent": 1, "type": "con",
"nodes": [
{
"border": "normal", "floating": "auto_off",
"type": "con", "percent": 0.333333333333333,
"name": "W1",
"swallows": [ { "window_role": "^W1$" } ]
},
{
"border": "normal", "floating": "auto_off",
"type": "con", "percent": 0.333333333333333,
"name": "W2",
"swallows": [ { "window_role": "^W2$" } ]
},
{
"border": "normal", "floating": "auto_off",
"type": "con", "percent": 0.333333333333333,
"name": "W3",
"swallows": [ { "window_role": "^W3$" } ]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"border": "normal", "floating": "auto_off",
"layout": "splitv", "percent": 0.333333333333333, "type": "con",
"nodes": [
{
"border": "normal", "floating": "auto_off",
"type": "con", "percent": 0.5,
"name": "W4",
"swallows": [ { "window_role": "^W4$" } ]
},
{
"border": "normal", "floating": "auto_off",
"type": "con", "percent": 0.5,
"name": "W5",
"swallows": [ { "window_role": "^W5$" } ]
}
]
},
{
"border": "normal", "floating": "auto_off",
"layout": "splitv", "percent": 0.333333333333333, "type": "con",
"nodes": [
{
"border": "normal", "floating": "auto_off",
"type": "con", "percent": 1,
"name": "W6",
"swallows": [ { "window_role": "^W6$" } ]
}
]
}
]
}
append_layout opens placeholder windows as defined in the layout file. If a window is created that matches the rules in swallow (in this example only window_role is checked) i3 puts it in place of the placeholder.
