named workspaces as dynamics

[aserowy]

Heho,

i switched to niri recently and it is a pleasure to work with it. I have one thing that bugs me. Coming from Hyprland/Sway my workflow resolved around creating and focusing workspaces by name.

Thus, creating workspaces by name with the given cli would be awesome. If this function would fit your vision, i can work/pr on the implementation with a small hint where i should start looking.

Kind regards
Alexander

[YaLTeR]

Hm, what's the workflow exactly?

[aserowy]

@YaLTeR Would this function be of interest to you? I could work on an integration.

[YaLTeR]

I'm not sure how exactly it should work and integrate with the config. One idea is to make IPC changes transient, like niri msg output: if any named workspaces change in the config, then all IPC changes are dropped, but as long as you don't change named workspaces in the config, IPC changes persist.

Then, what should the actual commands be? niri msg create-named-workspace "name" (which creates one at the very top, since it's the same code that is used by the configured named workspaces) or niri msg set-workspace-name "name" (which sets the name of the currently focused workspace that you need to create beforehand)? Then, niri msg unset-workspace-name to unname?

cc @algernon what do you think?

[algernon]

I can see both create-named-workspace and set-workspace-name justified, for slightly different workflows. set-workspace-name would be handy when you already collected a number of windows on a dynamic workspace, and want to name it for easier navigation. create-named-workspace would be useful when you know in advance you want to collect windows in a (temporary) named workspace.

I can see myself using set-workspace-name =)

[aserowy]

Can you give me a rough overview where to start? Would love to get a little bit invested into working on niri.

[algernon]

My recommendation would be to start with adding the commands - and have them do nothing - first. If you git grep for Action::, that'll give you a lot of pointers. Then, you can implement unset-workspace-name relatively easily, because layout.unname_workspace() is already there.

Then, you will likely need an add_named_workspace() function in src/layout/monitors.rs. Searching for self.workspaces.push will give you a few hints how to accomplish that. With that function present in Monitors, implementing create-named-workspace should be relatively easy.

For naming a workspace: that's very similar to how unname_workspace is implemented: rather than setting self.name to None in workspace.unname(), it'd set it to Some(string), and then build a few wrappers around it to be able to bind the operation to an IPC action.

Hope this helps!