Automatic align to center

[agenbite]

I'm really impressed by scroll: thank you!! :)

• Description:
  Automatic alignment is a great idea, but the algorithm could allow for an automatic alignment to the center, i.e., I'd like to see my active column in the center of my screen if it's surrounded by a column after and a column before, so I can get a visual cue of that fact. If there's no column to the left, I'd like my column to align left. Same with right. Does that make sense? Thanks again!!

[dawsers]

Thank you.

What you propose should probably also depend on how wide those columns are, etc. (you don't want to align to the left/right when the columns are very narrow, for example).

Because it is very hard to cover every possible workflow from every user, I added the Lua API.

There is an example of something very similar to what you are describing in the Discussions tab of this repository, under Lua API and scripts

In particular, these two seem very closely related to what you want:

#48 (comment)

#48 (comment)

Let me know if those fit what you want or you need some help creating another one that is better suited to your workflow.

[agenbite]

Wow, thanks!! The second script with 0.9 as a parameter does it almost perfectly! This is great!!

A minor improvement I'd like to have is when there's no column to the left/right: in that case, align left/right would be better. I have absolutely no experience with lua: is there a function I could call to tell me if there's a column to the left/right? I could use it in a conditional and get exactly where I wanted to... :)

[dawsers]

I think this could work for you:

local scroll = require("scroll")

local function on_focus(view, _)
  local workspace = scroll.focused_workspace()
  local container = scroll.view_get_container(view)
  local parent = scroll.container_get_parent(container)
  if parent then
    container = parent
  end
  local containers = scroll.workspace_get_tiling(workspace)
  for i, con in ipairs(containers) do
    if con == container then
      if i == 1 then
        scroll.workspace_set_mode(workspace, { center_horizontal = false })
        scroll.command(container, "align left")
      elseif i == #containers then
        scroll.workspace_set_mode(workspace, { center_horizontal = false })
        scroll.command(container, "align right")
      else
        scroll.workspace_set_mode(workspace, { center_horizontal = true })
      end
      return
    end
  end
end

scroll.add_callback("view_focus", on_focus, nil)

[agenbite]

Beautiful! Thanks! It does do what I wanted! :)

However, after activating the script, I'm observing a couple of quirks:

• Some animations stop working.
• Going back to a workspace where there are several columns take me to the last, independently of what was the last focused column.

Maybe these are unrelated to the script: is there a way to "disable" one of these scripts on the fly, so I can do some testing?

[dawsers]

Some animations will stop before they finish, because it is calling a command in the middle of an animation, like when you use two key bindings in a short period of time, the second action stops the animation for the first and starts the new animation for the new action.

I haven't experienced the second issue you see, focus works as expected when switching workspaces. However, I have seen another strange issue with vertical cycle_size on the first and last container of the workspace. That is probably a bug somewhere else. Scripts sometimes are useful to find bugs elsewhere that are not shown in regular use.

The best way to disable a script that doesn't have an argument to do so, is to comment it out in your config and reload the configuration ($mod+shift+c) so it is not loaded again.

[dawsers]

OK, this is what you need to use:

local scroll = require("scroll")

local function on_focus(view, _)
  local workspace = scroll.focused_workspace()
  local container = scroll.view_get_container(view)
  local parent = scroll.container_get_parent(container)
  if parent then
    container = parent
  end
  local containers = scroll.workspace_get_tiling(workspace)
  for i, con in ipairs(containers) do
    if con == container then
      if i == 1 or i == #containers then
        scroll.workspace_set_mode(workspace, { center_horizontal = false })
      else
        scroll.workspace_set_mode(workspace, { center_horizontal = true })
      end
      return
    end
  end
end

scroll.add_callback("view_focus", on_focus, nil)

I think this will work with animations and without any weird side effect.

[dawsers]

And if you want it to become a toggle and assign a key binding to it

local args, state = ...

local scroll = require("scroll")

local function on_focus(view, _)
  local workspace = scroll.focused_workspace()
  local container = scroll.view_get_container(view)
  local parent = scroll.container_get_parent(container)
  if parent then
    container = parent
  end
  local containers = scroll.workspace_get_tiling(workspace)
  for i, con in ipairs(containers) do
    if con == container then
      if i == 1 or i == #containers then
        scroll.workspace_set_mode(workspace, { center_horizontal = false })
      else
        scroll.workspace_set_mode(workspace, { center_horizontal = true })
      end
      return
    end
  end
end

local data = scroll.state_get_value(state, "data")
if data == nil then
  scroll.state_set_value(state, "data", { false, 0 })
  data = scroll.state_get_value(state, "data")
end

if args[1] == 'toggle' then
  data[1] = not data[1]
  if data[1] then
    local id = scroll.add_callback("view_focus", on_focus, nil)
    scroll.state_set_value(state, "data", { true, id })
  else
    scroll.remove_callback(data[2])
    scroll.state_set_value(state, "data", { false, 0 })
  end
end

bindsym --no-repeat $mod+q lua $lua_scripts/119.lua toggle

[agenbite]

Bingo!! This is great, thank you so much!!