swaywsr is a small program that uses Sways's IPC Interface to change the name of a workspace based on its contents.

It is a port from Daniel Berg's (roosta) i3wsr which I also contributed to. Most of the code is the same.

The chosen name for a workspace is a composite of the app_id (wayland native) or WM_CLASS X11 window property for each window in a workspace. In action it would look something like this:

Build a release binary,

cargo build --release

Just launch the program and it'll listen for events if you are running sway. Another option is to put something like this in your sway config

exec_always pgrep -x swaywsr > /dev/null && pkill -x swaywsr; $PATH_TO_RELEASE_BINARY

You must provide a config file that is passed using the --config path_to_file.toml option. The toml file has four fields:

• icons to assign icons to classes
• aliases to assign alternative names to be displayed
• general to assign the separator, the default icon and the protected workspace ending char.
• options to assign additional flags available in the cli interface. Replace hyphens from cli with underscores, e.g. --no-names would be no-names in the config file.

You can configure icons for the respective classes, a very basic preset for font-awesome is configured, to enable it use the option --icons awesome (requires font-awesome to be installed).

If you have icons and don't want the names to be displayed, you can use the --no-names flag.

Workspace name can be protected from dynamic renaming using a trailing character. It defaults to '.', but can be overwritten using the option ignore-char.

Example config can be found in assets/example_config.toml

[icons]
# font awesome
TelegramDesktop = ""
Firefox = ""
Alacritty = ""
Thunderbird = ""
# smile emoji
MyNiceProgram = "😛"

[aliases]
TelegramDesktop = "Telegram"
"Org.gnome.Nautilus" = "Nautilus"

[general]
seperator = ""
ignore-char = "#"

[options]
no-names = true
remove-duplicates = true

For an overview of available options

$ swaywsr -h
swaywsr - sway workspace renamer 1.1.0
Pedro Scaff <[email protected]>

USAGE:
    swaywsr [FLAGS] [OPTIONS]

FLAGS:
    -h, --help                 Prints help information
    -n, --no-names             Set to no to display only icons (if available)
    -r, --remove-duplicates    Remove duplicate entries in workspace
    -V, --version              Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -c, --config <config>    Path to toml config file
    -i, --icons <icons>      Sets icons to be used [possible values: awesome]

This program depends on numbered workspaces, since we're constantly changing the workspace name. So your sway configuration need to reflect this:

bindsym $mod+1 workspace number 1

If you don't necessarily bind your workspaces to only numbers, or you want to keep a part of the name constant you can do like this:

bindsym $mod+q workspace number 1:[Q]

This way the workspace would look something like this when it gets changed:

1:[Q] Emacs|Firefox

You can take this a bit further by using a bar that trims the workspace number and be left with only

[Q] Emacs|Firefox

• Pedro Scaff (pedroscaff)
• Raphaël Gallais-Pou (GallaisPoutine)

Thanks Daniel Berg (roosta) for the original i3wsr implementation. This program would not be possible without swayipc-rs, a rust library for controlling sway-wm through its IPC interface.