i3groups

A project based workflow for i3wm.

About

i3wm comes with workspaces. i3groups lets you assign these workspaces to groups for a more structured workflow while still letting you use all workspaces and other i3 features like you're used to.

i3groups lets you:

• assign workspaces to named groups
• focus groups by name or number, brining its last focused workspace into view for all outputs
• focus individual workspaces like you're used to^*
• rename groups and workspaces
• cycle through workspaces in active group and output
• cycle through outputs^*
• spawn new workspaces with the next available number^**
• save/restore the i3 tree like you're used to^*

i3groups consists of a ~120 and a ~30 line Python script for managing groups, a ~90 line patch to the i3bar C source to handle grouped workspaces correctly and ~30 i3 keybindings.

_{* Some of these features are enabled by native i3, but have been incorporated in the i3groups workflow as they work particularly well with other features.}
^{** Thanks to nervengift for making a cleaner solution to figuring out the next workspace number.}

Demo

TODO. VIDEO DEMONSTRATION PENDING.

Dependencies

i3groups depends on i3msg-python.
If you don't want to set up i3msg-python on your system you can just wget the relevant file as demonstrated in the installation section.

Installation

Get source files:

cd ~/
git clone https://github.com/Ceryn/i3groups.git

Set up i3msg-python (pip install i3msg --user) or just wget the script:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Ceryn/i3msg-python/master/i3msg.py
touch __init__.py

Make a link to i3groups.py somewhere in your PATH:

sudo ln -s ~/i3groups/i3groups.py /usr/local/bin/i3groups

Add i3groups keybindings to your i3 config:

cat keybindings.conf >> ~/.config/i3/config
i3-msg reload

i3groups is now active and running, but i3bar will need some love, since group names are appended to workspace names and i3bar needs to handle that.
Re-compile i3bar with the i3groups patch to make it great again (Debian assumed, your mileage may vary):

sudo apt build-dep i3
wget https://github.com/i3/i3/archive/4.14.1.tar.gz
tar -xzvf 4.14.1.tar.gz
patch -p0 -i i3groups.patch
cd i3-4.14.1
autoreconf -fi
mkdir build
cd build
../configure
make -j8
sudo make install
i3-msg restart

Finally, and optionally, if you want i3groups to remember which workspaces last had focus for each group on each monitor you will need to run i3groups-watchfocus.py somewhere in the background. You can omit this step, but then i3groups will just pick the first workspace in the group for each monitor when you focus a group:

echo '~/i3groups/i3groups-watchfocus.py &' >> ~/.profile
~/i3groups/i3groups-watchfocus.py &

And that's it. At this point everything should be working as expected.

Usage

i3groups will issue a dmenu prompt whenever input is needed except if name is provided.
Command line interface:

i3groups assign_group [name]
i3groups focus_group [name]
i3groups rename_group
i3groups rename_workspace
i3groups prev_workspace
i3groups next_workspace

Default keybinding modifiers:

### MODIFIERS ##################################################
set $mod   Mod1
set $ctrl  Control
set $shift Shift

Default keybindings (pasted from keybindings.conf):

### OUTPUTS ####################################################
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+j                focus output left
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+semicolon        focus output right
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+$shift+j         move workspace to output left
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+$shift+semicolon move workspace to output right

### GROUPS #####################################################
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+k        exec i3groups prev_workspace
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+l        exec i3groups next_workspace
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+r        exec i3groups rename_workspace
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+$shift+r exec i3groups rename_group
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+a        exec i3groups assign_group
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+f        exec i3groups focus_group

bindsym $mod+$ctrl+1  exec i3groups focus_group  1
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+2  exec i3groups focus_group  2
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+3  exec i3groups focus_group  3
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+4  exec i3groups focus_group  4
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+5  exec i3groups focus_group  5
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+6  exec i3groups focus_group  6
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+7  exec i3groups focus_group  7
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+8  exec i3groups focus_group  8
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+9  exec i3groups focus_group  9
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+10 exec i3groups focus_group 10

bindsym $mod+$ctrl+$shift+1  exec i3groups assign_group  1
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+$shift+2  exec i3groups assign_group  2
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+$shift+3  exec i3groups assign_group  3
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+$shift+4  exec i3groups assign_group  4
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+$shift+5  exec i3groups assign_group  5
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+$shift+6  exec i3groups assign_group  6
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+$shift+7  exec i3groups assign_group  7
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+$shift+8  exec i3groups assign_group  8
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+$shift+9  exec i3groups assign_group  9
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+$shift+10 exec i3groups assign_group 10

### WORKSPACES #################################################
# Create new workspace with the next available number. Thanks to nervengift.
bindsym $mod+$ctrl+Return exec "i3-msg workspace $(i3-msg -t get_workspaces | jq 'map(.num) | . + [0] | sort | . - [-1] | map(.+1) - . | .[0]')"

Additional keybindings for 12 more easy-access workspaces are recommended:

bindsym $mod+F1       workspace number 11
bindsym $mod+F2       workspace number 12
#[...]

bindsym $mod+Shift+F1 move container to workspace number 11
bindsym $mod+Shift+F2 move container to workspace number 12
#[...]

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome.
You can reach out with your ideas/requests/improvements on Freenode IRC (Ceryn, #i3) or here.