Expand query system to allow getting selected attribute only

[dominiklohmann]

I'm trying to re-implement chunkc tiling::query --monitor-for-desktop <id> and have done so using text replacements:

yabai -m query --spaces --space 2 | sed -n -e 's/^.*"monitor":\(.*\),/\1/p'

The syntax I'm proposing as a replacement is

yabai -m query --spaces --space 2 monitor

which should return just the monitor id of space 2 (and a newline at the end of the output).

[acmcelwee]

FWIW, jq is a much simpler way to process the existing query outputs than sed. Example:

$ yabai -m query --spaces --space 2 | jq .monitor
1

[dominiklohmann]

Didn't know jq. Lovely little tool. Thanks!

[koekeishiya]

Just for info, I'm going to rename the "monitor" key to "display" to remain consistent with the rest of the program. Not sure how I made that mistake here..

[koekeishiya]

Oh and you could also use yabai -m query --displays --space | jq .index to get the display of the active space.

[dominiklohmann]

On a similar note, I noticed that I can do stuff like this with jq:

# get all known open windows in a "app: window title" format
yabai -m query --windows | jq '.[] | .app + ": " + .title'

# get the space count of all displays
yabai -m query --displays | jq '.[].spaces'

Really amazing tool, makes this stuff so easy once you grok the syntax.

[koekeishiya]

On a related note - has anyone looked into how Spotlight works and if it is possible to create custom searchable text and commands for it? As focusing the proper window has now been resolved using the scripting addition, and with the information provided through the query system in yabai I think it would be handy to create a fuzzy-seach mechanism for focusing windows - this could let you filter windows visible on the current space, current display(?) or all known windows, or whatever.

[dominiklohmann]

There's Flashlight, which basically is an extension to Spotlight, but I'm not sure if it still works. It's never been running smoothly for me, although I've only tried it after it first came out. I since switched back to Alfred—they recently released v4—, which has workflows that are very easy to configure. It's basically Spotlight on steroids and much better in every regard, especially responsiveness.

Edit: Apparently Flashlight is completely broken on macOS Mojave, so scratch that. Alfred is definitely worth the small amount of money it costs, anyways.