i3ipc-lua

An improved Lua library to control i3wm.

NOTICE

This library will be merged into the main project, i3ipc-GLib soon in the v1.0.0 release of that project.

About

i3's interprocess communication (or ipc) is the interface i3wm uses to receive commands from client applications such as i3-msg. It also features a publish/subscribe mechanism for notifying interested parties of window manager events.

i3ipc-lua is a Lua library for controlling the window manager. This project is intended to be useful for general scripting, and for applications that interact with the window manager like status line generators, notification daemons, and pagers.

If you have an idea for a new script to extend i3wm, post your script to the examples directory or make a script request on the issue tracker.

Documentation

The latest documentation can be found here. i3ipc-lua is a GObject introspection library (kind of like gtk).

Installation

i3ipc-lua requires i3ipc-GLib and lua-lgi.

Then simply do:

./autogen.sh
sudo make install

Or get someone to host a package for your distro.

Example

#!/usr/bin/env lua

local i3ipc = require 'i3ipc'

-- Create the Connection object that can be used to send commands and subscribe
-- to events.
local conn = i3ipc.Connection()

-- Query the ipc for outputs. The result is a list that represents the parsed
-- reply of a command like `i3-msg -t get_outputs`.
local outputs = conn:get_outputs()

print('Active outputs:')

for _,o in ipairs(outputs) do
    if o.active then
        print(o.name)
    end
end

-- Send a command to be executed synchronously.
conn:command('focus left')

-- Define a callback to be called when you switch workspaces.
function on_workspace(self, e)
    -- The first parameter is the connection to the ipc and the second is an object
    -- with the data of the event sent from i3.
    if e.current then
        print('Windows on this workspace:')
        for _,w in ipairs(e.current:descendents()) do
            print(w.name)
        end
    end
end

-- Subscribe to the workspace event
conn:on('workspace', on_workspace)

-- Start the main loop and wait for events to come in.
conn:main()

Contributing

We should do what we can to make this library as Lua-like as good tastes allows. New features should be implemented on the main project at i3ipc-GLib.

License

This work is available under the GNU General Public License (See COPYING).

Copyright © 2014, Tony Crisci

All rights reserved.