Swayless

Swayless is an attempt to bring Suckless's DWM tag system to sway.

This helps you configure sway to work a bit more like Suckless's DWM. This means workspaces are more like tags. Each screen has 9 tags (workspaces are name-spaced on a per-screen basis). Each window/container is associated with 1 tag. You can see multiple tags at once in your screen.

It may also work with i3, but this is untested.

The initial code was based on Swaysome (by Skia), but it has nothing to do with it now.

Usage

Install it using cargo install --path ..

Then configure your sway. Mine looks like this:

# Init workspaces for every screen
exec "swayless init"

## Workspace keybinds

# switch to workspace
bindsym $mod+1 exec "swayless focus 1"
bindsym $mod+2 exec "swayless focus 2"
bindsym $mod+3 exec "swayless focus 3"
bindsym $mod+4 exec "swayless focus 4"
bindsym $mod+5 exec "swayless focus 5"
bindsym $mod+6 exec "swayless focus 6"
bindsym $mod+7 exec "swayless focus 7"
bindsym $mod+8 exec "swayless focus 8"
bindsym $mod+9 exec "swayless focus 9"

# move to workspace
bindsym $mod+Shift+1 exec "swayless move 1"
bindsym $mod+Shift+2 exec "swayless move 2"
bindsym $mod+Shift+3 exec "swayless move 3"
bindsym $mod+Shift+4 exec "swayless move 4"
bindsym $mod+Shift+5 exec "swayless move 5"
bindsym $mod+Shift+6 exec "swayless move 6"
bindsym $mod+Shift+7 exec "swayless move 7"
bindsym $mod+Shift+8 exec "swayless move 8"
bindsym $mod+Shift+9 exec "swayless move 9"

# bring workspace here
bindsym $mod+Control+1 exec "swayless move-workspace-here 1"
bindsym $mod+Control+2 exec "swayless move-workspace-here 2"
bindsym $mod+Control+3 exec "swayless move-workspace-here 3"
bindsym $mod+Control+4 exec "swayless move-workspace-here 4"
bindsym $mod+Control+5 exec "swayless move-workspace-here 5"
bindsym $mod+Control+6 exec "swayless move-workspace-here 6"
bindsym $mod+Control+7 exec "swayless move-workspace-here 7"
bindsym $mod+Control+8 exec "swayless move-workspace-here 8"
bindsym $mod+Control+9 exec "swayless move-workspace-here 9"

# focus next/prev output
bindsym $mod+Comma focus output left
bindsym $mod+Period focus output right

# move container to next/prev output
bindsym $mod+Shift+Comma exec "swayless prev-output"
bindsym $mod+Shift+Period exec "swayless next-output"

# switch to the previous tab of the current output
bindsym $mod+Tab exec "swayless alt-tab"

Commands

• alt-tab - Go to the previous tag on the current container
• focus [name] - Focus to another workspace on the same output
• help - Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
• init [name] - Initialize the workspaces for all the outputs (it's the server that handles the commands)
• move [name] - Move the focused container to another workspace on the same output
• move-workspace-here [name] - Move all containers in workspace to current workspace
• next-output [name] - Move the focused container to the next output
• prev-output [name] - Move the focused container to the previous output

Details

The init command initializes a server that listens to the requests that come from the other commands. As such, you have to have the server running to run the other commands. I did it like this because I needed to keep state.

Things like Waybar communicate with sway through the socket. Besides resorting to changing the source code, it would be difficult to exchange these calls for calls to swayless. With this, the init server also listens for workspace focus change events in sway and intercepts them. It's like these programs used swayless.

Missing features compared to DWM

• Containers/Windows can only belong to 1 tag;
• Tag 0 (show all tags) isn't implemented.

TODO

• Use regex, so I can make fewer request when moving multiple windows (i.e., borrowing tags)
• Fix the problems related to floating windows (there's a panic on an unwrap somewhere)