i3gopher

i3gopher is a helper rodent for i3 and Sway (the i3-compatible Wayland compositor). It may take on various chores.

Running

You probably want to run it from your .i3/config. Like:

exec --no-startup-id i3gopher

Using

Focus the last focused container

The rodent subscribes to i3 events and tracks the history of focused containers per workspace. It tries to be clever and ignores containers that disappear (are closed, or moved to another workspace).

Running i3gopher --focus-last will tell an already running i3gopher to focus the last focused container in the currently focused workspace.

bindsym Mod1+Tab exec --no-startup-id i3gopher --focus-last

Execute command on window event

If you are, like me, fixing to get the title of the currently focused window into the statusbar (maybe using xtitle), you might have a need for triggering i3status to refresh itself at suitable times. Since this rodent is already subscribing to window events, it has the feature to execute a command upon receiving such. You can thus start i3gopher like so:

exec --no-startup-id i3gopher --exec "killall -USR1 i3status"

Exclude windows from history

The optional --exclude option can be used to make i3gopher exclude certain windows from ever being added to the history. It takes a regular expression that is matched against the window's instance name (under i3). So, if you run i3gopher --exclude excludei3gopher, it will exclude an Alacritty that was started as alacritty --class excludei3gopher. Under Sway, Alacritty's --class sets the Wayland App ID, which the exclude argument is matched against (supported by i3wm go bindings since this commit).

Upgrading

Since version 1.0, POSIX/GNU style flags are used:

-     -exec string    cmd to exec
-     -focus-last     focus last
+     --exec string   cmd to exec
+ -l, --focus-last    focus last

TODO

• Consider floating containers. Should they be ignored? Or kept in a separate history? Since i3 has focus mode_toggle which focused the last floating or tiling container.

• How deep does the stack need to be?