Show HN: I3wm Alt+Tab Workspace Switcher

I've built something similar for my own needs.

What I found lacking in the default i3 possibilities, was going to the previously used window on the same workspace.

My daily driver is a 32" 4k monitor, so many times I end up with one IDE or terminal on the left, and some documentation on the right, both halves visible at the same time.

However, I hate using tabs in the browser, so thanks to a hacky extension, firefox opens a new window per tab, which means that i3 manages firefox' tabs as regular windows.

So, if you have a bunch of windows open, want to see the one in the middle of the bunch, but need to switch between that and the "work" window, there's no easy way to do that from the keyboard.

From the IDE, going right works as expected. But from the browser, going left "changes tabs". You only reach the IDE after you've been through all the other tabs.

  #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; }

The Windows alt+tab behaviour up to Windows 7 was reliable/predictable with two caveats, 1. Things that minimised to the notification area would not go to the back of the stack when you minimised them. 2. Microsoft Excel misbehaved - something to do with each workbook having its own window entry in the group, but also the application having this entry.

At some point since Windows 7 I played with it and found it to be no longer consistent. I could somewhat correct for this by using alt+esc to move a window to the back of the stack and then reverse to it with ctrl+shift+tab.

I like using Contexts on the Mac as replacement: https://contexts.co Looks like i3 does something similar?

Alt+Tab (or at least Cmd+Tab) works very predictably though, doesn't it? Most-recently-used order.

My work habits generally involve switching back and forth between two applications. Sometimes three.

Cmd+Tab switching works well for that. More convenient than, e.g., Cmd+3 then Cmd+7 etc.

I also appreciate Firefox's Ctrl+Tab for tab switching, which works the same way.

You can configure the window icons directly in the config file.

for_window [class="(?i)firefox"] title_format "<tt></tt><span foreground='#FF6611'>  </span><tt> </tt>%title

You still have that available. This is for when you might not remember which workspace the stuff you're looking for or are just more visual in recognizing the workspace you need.

TBH I find that a visual of what the window looks like helps a ton. I just ran that to see what it did, and all it gives is the text of the window title.

I miss Mod + {1..n} when using macOS!! I know they do allow workspace switching via keyboard shortcuts. But the minute you full screen an app, that breaks. Full screened apps are taken out of the desktop workflow. So even though a three-finger swipe can move between a full-screen app and a desktop, keyboard shortcuts cannot.

I'm very new to i3 but could you not set up a similar set of keybinds with it? What does XMonad add for you?

EDIT: I've just stolen this btw. I was never using the higher workspaces because $mod+number gets less convenient on higher numbers. This pattern works great though, thanks!

I used i3 for several years and liked it a lot. I've recently switched to XMonad and I think I like it more. I find the configuration to be far more flexible, and the defaults aligned more with my natural preferences. My i3 config was pretty sizeable, but my XMonad config is (for now) quite small. Additionally, I found cycling tiling layouts in XMonad was a very useful feature that I never got from i3. Also I like Haskell, so that was a +1 for XMonad.

So I'm working on something on workspace N, but I want to peek at a job or browser running on workspace 3, then go back to what I was doing. How do I get back to workspace N without going through "Was I on workspace 5? No, 2? No, 7? Ok, that's where I was."

I used to do this all the time when I was on a laptop as my primary machine, with many things either full screen windows or ~3 windows on the screen, and different tasks on different workspaces. "Back to last workspace" was something I used all the time.

> But the problem with the OS X implementation is that after you switch to an app switching between windows is like throwing darts in teh dark. There is no overall context available at all.

There's also the fact that, IIRC, it brings all the non-minimized windows of the app to the front.

Macos is really big on the document model, where a window is tied to a document (file, a set of data, a list of objects), so Option-Tab to switch between applications, and Option-Backquote for said documents/windows.

I don't understand the continued obsession with "grouping" application instances together like this (Windows and macOS both do this, in different places and different ways).

Dear OS: If I have multiple instances of an application open it's because I'm doing different things. If one is a text editor, you should not act differently depending on if the other one is a PDF viewer or another text editor.

Many applications already have their own "grouping", usually called tabs. Web browsers being a really obvious one, and where this application grouping is the worst. Half my "apps" are really just web pages.

Grouping the window where I'm testing the web application I'm currently coding with the IDE where I'm working on the code would make way more sense than grouping it with my web-based email client... yet here we are.