Overwiew

Expo is an simple and straightforward way to get a visual impression of all your current virtual desktops that many compositing window managers use. It's not a very powerful approach, but a very intuitive one and especially fits workflows that use lots of temporary windows or those in which the workspaces are mentally arranged in a grid.

i3expo emulates that function within the limitations of a non-compositing window manager. By listening to the IPC, it takes a screenshot whenever a window event occurrs. Thanks to an extremely fast C library, this produces negligible overhead in normal operation and allows the script to remember what state you left a workspace in.

The script is run as a background process and reacts to signals in order to open its UI in which you get an overview of the known state of your workspaces and can select another with the mouse or keyboard.

This fork

This fork adds:

• Dynamic workspace grid (changes size depending on how many workspaces you have)
• Multi-monitor support
• Vertical monitor support
• Compact view for better use of screen real estate
• Drag focused window to a new or different workspace
• Create a new workspace on any monitor with one click
• Bugfixes and performance improvements (via cache)
• Visual/Aesthetic perks
• Zero configuration service with reasonable default settings

Example output:

Dependencies

• Python 3
• PyGame
• i3ipc

Usage

Compile the prtscn.c as follows:

gcc -shared -O3 -Wall -fPIC -Wl,-soname,prtscn -o prtscn.so prtscn.c -lX11

Put the prtscn.so in the same directory as the Python script (or adjust the location in the code).

Copy the default config to your .config folder like so:

mkdir -p ~/.config/i3expo
cp defaultconfig ~/.config/i3expo/config

Colors can be specified by using their PyGame names or in #fff or #ffffff hex.

Display output names can be unpleasant to read but you can alias them in hte config file if you wish. Here's an example:

[OUTPUT_ALIASES]

DVI-D-0 = Center
HDMI-A-0 = Right
DisplayPort-0 = Left

Add this to your i3 config exec_always "~/i3expo-ng/i3expod.py -f -w /home/user/Images/wallpapers/14.jpg"

-f is for fullscreen (causes pygame to crash on a black screen on some distros)

-w is for wallpaper. Should match your i3 wallpaper

All parameters are optional.

Send SIGUSR1 to i3expod.py to show the Expo UI, for example by adding bindsym $mod+Tab exec --no-startup-id "killall -s SIGUSR1 i3expod.py" to your i3 config. Send SIGHUP to have the application reload its configuration.

Navigate the UI with the mouse or with they keyboard using hjkl, the arrow keys, Return and Escape.

Known issues

On some distros (or hardware? has to be investigated more) fullscreen mode will crash pygame on a black screen. Simple workaround is to remove -f flag and use the program windowed

Limitations

Since it works by taking screenshots, the application cannot know workspaces it hasn't seen yet. Furthermore, the updates are less continuous than you might be used to if you're coming from a compositing WM where they can happen live and in the background.

When you drag the active window to a new or another workspace, the screenshot of the current workspace won't be updated until the workspace isn't visited back again, and will continue to show the window you moved. There's no clean way to handle this as it would require taking a screenshot of the workspace after you changed it and before jumping to the new/other workspace you dragged your window to.

Empty workspaces don't technically exist to i3 and are thus inaccessible in the default config because it's not possible to handle named inexistant workspaces. If you still want to access them, you will have to set switch_to_empty_workspaces to True and define your names under Workspaces like e. g. workspace_1 = 1:Firefox.

Bugs

Stalled windows whose content i3 doesn't know cause interface bugs and could probably be handled better, but this needs more testing.

Todo

It's theoretically feasible to take the window information from i3's tree and allow for dragging of windows from one workspace to another or even from container to container. However, this would be massively complex (especially on the UI side) and it's not clear if it would be worth the effort. <-- Kind of did it. It was worth it :)

And getting it into a publishable state, obviously.

Credit

Stackoverflow user JHolta for the screenshot library to be found in this thread: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69645/take-a-screenshot-via-a-python-script-linux

GitLab/Reddit user d.reis for the idea and initial implementation which got me started :) https://www.reddit.com/r/i3wm/comments/8at5dv/i_wrote_an_expolike_script_for_i3/

https://gitlab.com/d.reis/i3expo