On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 6:31 PM, Axel Wagner <m...@merovius.de> wrote: > Hi, > > Excerpts from Fam Zheng's message of 2013-03-21 04:16:32 +0100: >> Of course a bar option can be added too to enable/disable this >> feature. Or even give some sophisticated format option for the title, >> and also enable user to manually rename it. Would this feature be >> useful? >> >> To do this we need to add a few new events trigger and maybe a "title" >> field in get_workspace msg. I already have a demo modification for you >> to test how it feels, based on master. Now my life with many >> workspaces is much easier. :) > > I think the only modification needed to i3 would be a focus-change-event > (and maybe with a little hack not even that) and what you want can be > entirely done with an ipc-script, no modifications to i3bar necessary. > > So I would do it like that: Have a daemon running that listens for focus > events, everytime such an event is triggered, get the current > workspaces, find out for each one, what window is currently focused > (maybe the focus event could include the „change“-data which would make > this step unnecessary) and change the title of that workspace to the > title of that window.
> > As I said, I think it could also be possible with a little „hack“: By > using the workspace-event you could change the title everytime you > change away from a ws. Then you would have accurately titles for every > ws _not_ currently focused, which should be enough for getting an > overview. > > I think i3bar is definitely the wrong place to do what you want, though > it is a good idea. > Doing it in i3 (by including an option to change the ws-title to the > currently focused window) would be better, because then the feature > would be available to users of alternative ws-bars, if they exist. But > this would still be a lot of complexity added to i3 in C for something, > that can be done with IPC and a scripting-language. > Implementing the focus-change-event you should do in any case, imho, > because I ran over a few usecases which would profit from that in my > time. Event is the easiest part, just send an event at the end of `con_focus for window, as well as handle_destroy_notify_event, handle_windowname_change, would suffice. Renaming would be trickier, that would need a remap of key binding too, which sounds not so neat. IMO "name" of ws and "caption" or "title" of ws should be isolated, because mixing ws identifier and it's display is not a good idea, despite the complexity for the "ipc-script" to decompose and extract the original ws name, and query and parse the whole tree, and then remap all the keybindings to this workspace (would be a nightmare if many bindings refer to it) for each change. The thing will be much easier if i3 adds a "caption" property to ws, so that i3bar and other bars can optionally render it to user, and this also benefits that renaming a workspace becomes more straightforward (no longer messing any keybinding). Maybe I'm too used to tmux. This is <100 LOC for both i3 and i3bar changes, if this feature is demanded, I can post my patch for review. > > > Regards, > > Axel
