i3wsr - i3 workspace renamer

i3wsr is a small program that uses I3's IPC Interface to change the name of a workspace based on its contents.

Details

The chosen name for a workspace is a composite of the WM_CLASS X11 window property for each window in a workspace. In action it would look something like this:

Installation

Rust, and Cargo is required, and i3wsr can be installed using cargo like so:

cargo install i3wsr

Or alternatively, you can build a release binary,

cargo build --release

Then place the built binary, located at target/release/i3wsr, somewhere on your $path.

Usage

Just launch the program and it'll listen for events if you are running I3. Another option is to put something like this in your i3 config

exec_always --no-startup-id exec $HOME/.cargo/bin/i3wsr

Configuration

This program depends on numbered workspaces, since we're constantly changing the workspace name. So your I3 configuration need to reflect this:

bindsym $mod+1 workspace number 1

If you're like me and don't necessarily bind your workspaces to only numbers, or you want to keep a part of the name constant you can do like this:

bindsym $mod+q workspace number 1:[Q]

This way the workspace would look something like this when it gets changed:

1:[Q] Emacs|Firefox

You can take this a bit further by using a bar that trims the workspace number and be left with only

[Q] Emacs|Firefox

Test environment

To run the tests Xvfb needs to be installed and run:

Xvfb :99.0

This sets up a headless x server running on DISPLAY :99.0, then some apps needs to be run in this new server:

env DISPLAY=:99.0 gpick
env DISPLAY=:99.0 i3 -c /etc/i3/config

refer to .travis.yml for a CI example

Attribution

This program would not be possible without i3ipc-rs, a rust library for controlling i3-wm through its IPC interface and rust-xcb, a set of rust bindings and wrappers for XCB.