i3-msg socket path should follow i3 default socket path

[jirib]

Hello,
I use i3-msg from outside of X11 env, thus i3-msg doesn't find socket path info from X11 root window, IIUC.

i3-msg: Could not connect to i3 on socket "/tmp/i3-ipc.sock": No such file or directory

Thus it would be nice if i3-msg would use i3 default socket path by default, so I do not need to to explicitly define it.
(i3-msg runs OK when executed from X11 env, but I talk for example about scripts running from cron etc. using i3-msg).
Thanks!

Version: i3-4.8p3 / OpenBSD 5.7 snapshot 2015-03-18
Reproduce steps: log into console (not X11 env) and for example do i3-msg "exec /usr/bin/touch /tmp/test"

[i3bot]

I don’t see a link to logs.i3wm.org. Did you follow http://i3wm.org/docs/debugging.html? (In case you actually provided a link to a logfile, please ignore me.)

[i3bot]

I don’t see a version number. Could you please copy & paste the output of i3 --version into this issue?

[acrisci]

I would be weary of this change because it seems like too much guessing. If i3 is not running on the display, or if there is no display, I think an error is appropriate. Keep in mind that there could be any number of i3 processes running at one time.

The best way to do this is to find your display env variable:

echo $DISPLAY

It's probably something like :0. Then in your script:

DISPLAY=:0 i3-msg focus left

and that should work fine.

[jirib]

Sorry but the purpose of socket communication is just that - use the socket. Why would I need to know DISPLAY if I want to use socket? That doesn't make much sense.
From man i3:

/tmp/i3-%u.XXXXXX/ipc-socket.%p by default

OK, valid point is there could be more i3 instance of the one user. Thus I'm closing this bug as I overlooked that "external" i3-msg cannot know which instance it wants to talk, that's why there's XXXXXX in the socket path.
Sorry for the noise.

[jirib]

Ah, got it about DISPLAY :) One discovers everyday some new things, thanks!