Swayr is a window switcher (and more) for sway

Swayr consists of a demon, and a client. The demon swayrd records window/workspace creations, deletions, and focus changes using sway's JSON IPC interface. The client swayr offers subcommands, see swayr --help, and sends them to the demon which executes them.

Right now, there are these subcommands:

next-window focuses the next window in depth-first iteration order of the tree.
prev-window focuses the previous window in depth-first iteration order of the tree.
switch-window displays all windows in the order urgent first, then last-recently-used, focused last and focuses the selected.
quit-window displays all windows and quits the selected one.
switch-to-urgent-or-lru-window switches to the next window with urgency hint (if any) or to the last recently used window.
switch-workspace displays all workspaces in LRU order and switches to the selected one.
switch-workspace-or-window displays all workspaces and their windows and switches to the selected workspace or window.
quit-workspace-or-window displays all workspaces and their windows and allows to quit either the selected workspace (all its windows) or the selected window.
execute-swaymsg-command displays most swaymsg which don't require additional input and executes the selected one. That's handy especially for less often used commands not bound to a key.
execute-swayr-command displays all commands above and executes the selected one. (This is useful for accessing swayr commands which are not bound to a key.)

Screenshots

A screenshot of swayr switch-window

A screenshot of swayr switch-workspace-or-window

Installation

Some distros have packaged swayr so that you can install it using your distro's package manager. Alternatively, it's easy to build and install it yourself using cargo.

Distro packages

The following GNU/Linux and BSD distros package swayr. Thanks a lot to the respective package maintainers! Refer to the repology site for details.

Building with cargo

You'll need to install the current stable rust toolchain using the one-liner shown at the official rust installation page.

Then you can install swayr like so:

cargo install swayr

For getting updates easily, I recommend the cargo install-update plugin.

# Install it once.
cargo install install-update

# Then you can update all installed rust binary crates including swayr using:
cargo install-update --all

# If you only want to update swayr, you can do so using:
cargo install-update -- swayr

Usage

You need to start the swayr demon swayrd in your sway config (~/.config/sway/config) like so:

exec env RUST_BACKTRACE=1 swayrd > /tmp/swayrd.log 2>&1

The setting of RUST_BACKTRACE=1 and the redirection of the output to some logfile is optional but helps a lot when something doesn't work. Especially, if you encounter a crash in certain situations and you want to report a bug, it would be utmost helpful if you could reproduce the issue with backtrace and logging and attach that to your bug report.

Next to starting the demon, you want to bind swayr commands to some keys like so:

bindsym $mod+Space exec env RUST_BACKTRACE=1 \
    swayr switch-window >> /tmp/swayr.log 2>&1

bindsym $mod+Delete exec env RUST_BACKTRACE=1 \
    swayr quit-window > /tmp/swayr.log 2>&1

bindsym $mod+Tab exec env RUST_BACKTRACE=1 \
    swayr switch-to-urgent-or-lru-window >> /tmp/swayr.log 2>&1

bindsym $mod+Next exec env RUST_BACKTRACE=1 \
    swayr next-window >> /tmp/swayr.log 2>&2

bindsym $mod+Prior exec env RUST_BACKTRACE=1 \
    swayr prev-window >> /tmp/swayr.log 2>&2

bindsym $mod+Shift+Space exec env RUST_BACKTRACE=1 \
    swayr switch-workspace-or-window >> /tmp/swayr.log 2>&1

bindsym $mod+c exec env RUST_BACKTRACE=1 \
    swayr execute-swaymsg-command >> /tmp/swayr.log 2>&1

bindsym $mod+Shift+c exec env RUST_BACKTRACE=1 \
    swayr execute-swayr-command >> /tmp/swayr.log 2>&1

Of course, configure the keys to your liking. Again, enabling rust backtraces and logging are optional.

Configuration

Swayr can be configured using the ~/.config/swayr/config.toml config file.

If it doesn't exist, a simple default configuration will be created on the first invocation for use with the wofi menu program.

It should be easy to adapt that default config for usage with other menu programs such as dmenu, bemenu, rofi, a script spawning a terminal with fzf, or whatever. The only requirement is that the launcher needs to be able to read the items to choose from from stdin, and spit out the selected item to stdout.

The default config looks like this:

[menu]
executable = 'wofi'
args = [
    '--show=dmenu',
    '--allow-markup',
    '--allow-images',
    '--insensitive',
    '--cache-file=/dev/null',
    '--parse-search',
    '--prompt={prompt}',
]

[format]
window_format = '{urgency_start}<b>“{title}”</b>{urgency_end} — <i>{app_name}</i> on workspace {workspace_name}   <span alpha="20000">({id})</span>'
workspace_format = '<b>Workspace {name}</b>   <span alpha="20000">({id})</span>'
html_escape = true
urgency_start = '<span background="darkred" foreground="yellow">'
urgency_end = '</span>'
icon_dirs = [
    '/usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps',
    '/usr/share/icons/Adwaita/48x48/apps',
    '/usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps',
    '/usr/share/pixmaps',
]
fallback_icon = '/usr/share/pixmaps/archlinux-logo.png'

[layout]
auto_tile = false
auto_tile_min_window_width_per_output_width = [
    [1024, 500],
    [1280, 600],
    [1400, 680],
    [1440, 700],
    [1600, 780],
    [1920, 920],
    [2560, 1000],
    [3440, 1000],
    [4096, 1200],
]

In the following, all sections are explained.

The menu section

In the [menu] section, you can specify the menu program using the executable name or full path, and the args (flags and options) it should get passed. If some argument contains the placeholder {prompt}, it is replaced with a prompt such as "Switch to window" depending on context.

The format section

In the [format] section, format strings are specified defining how selection choises are to be layed out. wofi supports pango markup which makes it possible to style the text using HTML and CSS. The following formats are supported right now.

window_format defines how windows are displayed. The placeholder {title} is replaced with the window's title, {app_name} with the application name, {marks} with a comma-separated list of the window's marks, {app_icon} with the application's icon (a path to a PNG or SVG file), {workspace_name} with the name or number of the workspace the window is shown, and {id} is the window's sway-internal con id. There are also the placeholders {urcency_start} and {urgency_end} which get replaced by the empty string if the window has no urgency flag, and with the values of the same-named formats if the window has the urgency flag set. That makes it possible to highlight urgent windows as shown in the default config.
workspace_format defines how workspaces are displayed. There are the placeholders {name} which gets replaced by the workspace's number or name, and {id} which gets replaced by the sway-internal con id of the workspace.
html_escape defines if the strings replacing the placeholders above (except for {urgency_start} and {urgency_end}) should be HTML-escaped.
urgency_start is a string which replaces the {urgency_start} placeholder in window_format.
urgency_end is a string which replaces the {urgency_end} placeholder in window_format.
icon_dirs is a vector of directories in which to look for application icons in order to compute the {app_icon} replacement.
fallback_icon is a path to some PNG/SVG icon which will be used as {app_icon} if no application-specific icon can be determined.

It is crucial that during selection (using wofi or some other menu program) each window has a different display string. Therefore, it is highly recommended to include the {id} placeholder at least in window_format. Otherwise, e.g., two terminals (of the same terminal app) with the same working directory (and therefore, the same title) wouldn't be distinguishable.

Hint for wofi: wofi supports icons with the syntax 'img:<image-file>:text:<text>', so a suitable window_format with application icon should start with img:{app_icon}:text:.

Hint for rofi: rofi supports icons with the syntax "<text>\u0000icon\u00001f<image-file>", so a suitable window_format with application icon should end with "\u0000icon\u001f<image-file>". Also note that you must enclose your window_format value with double-quotes and not with single-quotes. Singe-quote strings are literal strings in TOML where no escape-sequences are processed whereas for double-quoted strings (so-called basic strings) escape-sequences are processed. rofi requires a null character and a PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR for image sequences.

The layout section

In the [layout] section, you can enable auto-tiling by setting auto_tile to true (the default is false). The option auto_tile_min_window_width_per_output_width defines the minimum width in pixels which your windows should have per output width. For example, the example setting above says that on an output which is 1600 pixels wide, each window should have at least a width of 780 pixels, thus there may be at most two side-by-side windows (Caution, include your borders and gaps in your calculation!). There will be no auto-tiling doesn't include your output's exact width.

If auto_tile is enabled, swayr will automatically split either vertically or horizontally according to this algorithm:

For all outputs:
- For all (nested) containers on that output (except the scratchpad):
  - For all child windows of that container:
    - If the container is split horizontally and creating another window would make the current child window smaller than the minimum width, execute split vertical (the swaymsg command over IPC) on the child.
    - Else if the container is split vertically and now there is enough space so that creating another window would still leave the current child window above or equal to the minimum width, call split horizontal on the child.
    - Otherwise, do nothing for this container. This means that stacked or tabbed containers will never be affected by auto-tiling.

There is one caveat: it would be nice to also trigger auto-tiling when windows or containers are resized but unfortunately, resizing doesn't issue any events over IPC. Therefore, auto-tiling is triggered by new-window events, close-events, move-events, floating-events, and also focus-events. The latter are a workaround and wouldn't be required if there were resize-events.

Questions & Patches

For asking questions, sending feedback, or patches, refer to my public inbox (mailinglist). Please mention the project you are referring to in the subject.

swayr 0.6.2