quickswitch-i3 2.1

Quickly change to and locate windows in i3

Overview

This utility for i3, inspired by Pentadactyl’s :buffers command, allows you to quickly switch to and locate windows on all your workspaces, using an interactive dmenu prompt. It has since gained a lot of other functionality to make working with i3 even more efficient.

Usage

Finding windows

The core functionality of quickswitch is still finding windows and jumping to them, and this is what it does when you call it without any options.

Here’s how it looks in action:

However, sometimes you may want to grab a window and move it to your current workspace. This can be done with the -m/--move flag.

A similiar feature is the -s/--scratchpad flag, which searches your scratchpad, and does a scratchpad show on the window you choose.

You can also search and jump (or move) via regular expression using the -r/--regex flag, without using dmenu. This could be useful for scripting, or if you are a regex wizard who feels limited by dmenu.

Workspaces

quickswitch also provides a few functions to manage workspaces. First of all, it allows you to search workspaces in the same fashion as windows with the -w/--workspaces flag. This is extremely useful for working with many named workspaces without having them bound to any particular key.

Another useful feature is to quickly get an empty workspace. This is what the -e/--empty flag does: it will jump you to the first empty, numbered workspace.

If you use this excessively, then your numbered workspaces might fragment a lot. You can fix this easily with -g/--degap, which “defragments” your workspaces, without affecting their order (eg, [1, 4, 7] becomes [1, 2, 3] by renaming 4 to 2 and 7 to 3).

dmenu

You can influence how dmenu is called with the -d/--dmenu flag, which expects a complete dmenu command. The default is dmenu -b -i -l 20 (which makes dmenu appear on the bottom of your screen (-b) in a vertical manner with at most 20 lines (-l 20), and matches case insensitively (-i). See the man page for dmenu for a list of options.

Note: The versions of quickswitch before 2.0 used explicit flags for changing dmenu’s behavior. This was rather inflexible, because it needed an explicit flag for every dmenu option, and it hardcoded the dmenu command. For most people, the default should be fine, but if you want to change anything, this allows you to go wild.

Dependencies

quickswitch-i3 requires dmenu (which you likely already have installed), and i3-py, which you can install with pip install i3-py.

quickswitch-i3 was tested in Python 2.7.3 and 3.2.3. It will not work in version prior to 2.7 due to the usage of argparse.

Installation

quickswitch-i3 has a PyPI entry, so you can install it with pip install quickswitch-i3. Alternatively, you can always manually run the setup file with python setup.py install.

Additionally, if you are an Arch user, you can install it from the AUR. The package is called quickswitch-i3. The PKGBUILD is also included here.

An overlay for Gentoo is in the works.

Contributions

…are obviously welcome. Pretty much every feature in quickswitch originated because someone (not just me) thought “hey, this would be useful”. Just shoot a Pull Request.

License

Disclaimer: quickswitch-i3 is a third party script and in no way affiliated with the i3 project.

This program is free software under the terms of the Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License. It comes without any warranty, to the extent permitted by applicable law. For a copy of the license, see COPYING or head to http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/COPYING.