Put Icons On Workspaces

Rename sway workspaces with icons according to the applications running on them. It constructs the name based on a format string from the config. Duplicate icons are stripped from the list.

With a space as separator and waybar, it looks like this:

Installation & Usage

Build and install from source with cargo. Then simply run the executable. See piow --help for supported cli options.

# install
cargo install piow
# run
piow
# increase log level for troubleshooting, possible values: Trace, Debug, Info, Warn, Error
RUST_LOG=piow=Debug piow

Configuration

piow looks for a configuration file in toml format in ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/piow/config.toml and /etc/xdg/piow/config.toml (former takes precedence). If it can't find this file, it loads the default configuration contained in this repo. The configuration contains a map of application names to icons, a default icon and a separator between workspaces number and icons. For getting started, just copy default.toml over to ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/piow/config.toml and start adding your own icons.

Watch the log for messages like [WARN piow::nodes] No icon for application 'app-name' in the config. to find applications without a config entry. Just add a line "app-name" = "icon" to the end of the config file and restart piow. The crate find_unicode is awesome for finding suitable icons on the command line.

Setup with sway & waybar

Add the following to your sway config file at ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/sway/config. By forwarding the log you get access to application names without a icon in the config.

exec_always --no-startup-id piow --syslog

It's useful to turn of additional renaming in waybar, e.g. remove "format" and "format-icon" from the sway/workspaces directive in the waybar config similar to this:

sway/workspaces {
  "disable-scroll": true,
  "all-outputs": true
}

Hint: If you remove the workspace number placeholder %i from the format string, the ordering of the workspaces may no longer work as intended.

Similar Projects

Workstyle has a similar approach but uses the i3 IPC connection. The config file format was inspired by this crate.