Put Icons On Workspaces
Rename sway workspaces with icons according to the applications running on them. It constructs the name based on a format string from the config. Duplicate icons are stripped from the list.
With a space as separator and waybar, it looks like this:

Installation & Usage
Build and install from source with cargo. Then simply run the executable. See piow --help for
supported cli options.
# install
# run
# increase log level for troubleshooting, possible values: Trace, Debug, Info, Warn, Error
RUST_LOG=piow=Debug
Configuration
piow looks for a configuration file in toml format in ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/piow/config.toml and
/etc/xdg/piow/config.toml (former takes precedence). If it can't find this file, it loads the
default configuration contained in this repo. The configuration contains a map of application names
to icons, a default icon and a separator between workspaces number and icons. For getting started,
just copy default.toml over to ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/piow/config.toml and start adding your own
icons.
| Configuration Key | Description |
|---|---|
default_icon |
Icon used for apps without a configured icon |
format_str |
Format string for generating names. Supported placeholders: %n: Workspace number %i: Icons |
icon_separator |
Literal between icons |
[icons] |
paris of "app-id" = "icon", app id as reported by swaymsg -t get_tree, matches substrings, e.g. an entry 'libre' will be matched for 'libreoffice' |
Watch the log for messages like [WARN piow::nodes] No icon for application 'app-name' in the config. to find applications without a config entry. Just add a line "app-name" = "icon" to the
end of the config file and restart piow. The crate find_unicode is awesome for finding suitable
icons on the command line.
Setup with sway & waybar
Add the following to your sway config file at ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/sway/config. By forwarding the
log you get access to application names without a icon in the config.
It's useful to turn of additional renaming in waybar, e.g. remove "format" and "format-icon"
from the sway/workspaces directive in the waybar config similar to this:
sway/workspaces
Hint: If you remove the workspace number placeholder
%ifrom the format string, the ordering of the workspaces may no longer work as intended.
Similar Projects
Workstyle has a similar approach but uses the i3 IPC connection. The config file format was inspired by this crate.