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Move to previously-used workspace

asked 2014-11-26 00:05:59 +0000

cdfh gravatar image

updated 2014-11-26 05:47:31 +0000

Adaephon gravatar image

I would like to be able to navigate my workspaces as a stack (i.e., so that I can traverse the stack to see my workspaces in order of how recently they were last used; similar to how alt-tab is frequently configured to work). How would I do this in i3?

Backstory: Many years ago (more than five) I extended xmonad so as to be able to do this. I've been using my custom xmonad happily since, but have unfortunately been unable to update xmonad for several years because my extensions no longer compile. These days I don't have nearly enough time to re-extend xmonad (or any rival), so am looking for the window manager that is closest out of the box. Currently, I believe I've settled on i3, though this particular feature is one I'm sorely missing...

Note: I have already found workspace back_and_forth, but this isn't quite what I'm looking for. My window manager normally has an uptime spanning seasons, and so I have various odds and ends that I'm still working on hidden at the bottom of my stack. They never pester me during my day-to-day work until I explicitly traverse the stack looking for them (and in the mean time, they get quasi-permanent residence in my swapspace). The back_and_forth function would be handy for a small project spanning only two workspaces, but wouldn't scale to handle my backlog of workspaces. I also never know the names of my workspaces, creating them dynamically and anonymously on-demand. In practice, I don't have the organisational skills to avoid needing a stack by clustering my work around named workspaces.

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An interesting idea. Do you want to just have a list of workspaces (perhaps with a listing of windows) ordered by time of last visit . Or do you actually want to have a look at them while switching through the stack, in which case we would need to differentiate between "just looking" and "go there".

Adaephon gravatar imageAdaephon ( 2014-11-26 06:07:21 +0000 )edit

Sorry, Adaephon, for my slow reply. In xmonad, I used meta-backtick (key above tab on my keyboard) to start traversing the stack without mutation. On release of meta, it removed the current workspace from the stack and pushed it to the top of the stack.

cdfh gravatar imagecdfh ( 2014-11-28 18:27:01 +0000 )edit

I should mention that while traversing workspaces, meta-tab would be rebound to traverse workspaces in the opposite order. Normally meta-tab would traverse windows in a forward order (and while doing that, meta-backtick would be rebound to traverse windows in reverse order). Happy days :-)

cdfh gravatar imagecdfh ( 2014-11-28 18:28:47 +0000 )edit

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answered 2014-12-06 22:37:51 +0000

Michael gravatar image

You’d write a script using the IPC interface, see http://i3wm.org/docs/ipc.html

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Asked: 2014-11-26 00:05:59 +0000

Seen: 162 times

Last updated: Dec 06 '14