i3switch - Intuitive i3 Window Switching Utility

We pick tiled window managers to improve our productivity. They allow us to lay out the workspace in a way that we can see all the necessary information at a glance. This is the superpower of tiled window managers. And the switching mechanism should follow this mindset. We want to switch quickly to our layed out windows quickly, intuitively and efficiently.

This is what i3switch is all about. It allows You to switch to what You see, without the necessary abstraction of the manual tiling structure.

For more history and motivation, see history.md.

Preview

Preview demonstrates directional switching (without touching active tabs) and tab navigation (preserving focused window in the selected tab).

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Features

• Directional Switching: Switch to the next window VISIBLE window in the specified direction.
• Tab Navigation: Switch to the next window in the current tabbed container.
• Tab Number Switching: Switch to the specified tab number in the current tabbed container.
• Floating Switching: Switch between floating windows in the direction or windows-like tab navigation.
• Multi-Monitor Support: Switch windows across multiple monitors, respecting their layout.

Getting Started

To get started compile and install the i3switch binary.

make -C rust
sudo make -C rust install

Make sure You have the path to the i3switch binary in Your $PATH. You can check this by running:

which i3switch

Then modify Your i3 config file to bind the commands to keybindings. For example:

bindsym $mod+h exec i3switch left
bindsym $mod+j exec i3switch down
bindsym $mod+k exec i3switch up
bindsym $mod+l exec i3switch right
bindsym $mod+Tab exec i3switch next wrap
bindsym $mod+Shift+Tab exec i3switch prev wrap

Building & Running

Each implementation has it's own Makefile, default target will build a release binary.

# Build one language release binary
make -C python
make -C cpp dist/i3switch
make cpp/dist/i3switch

# Build all release binaries
make all

# Build release binaries and packages
# Note: For dependability version must match the current language version git tag.
make i3switch-rs_1.0.0-ubuntu_amd64.deb

# Build changelog
make rust/dist/CHANGELOG.md

Proper binary versioning require .git repository to be present and tags to be fetched.

Project Structure

i3switch/
├── python/      # Python implementation
├── cpp/         # C++ implementation
├── rust/        # Rust implementation
├── scripts/     # Shared scripts (e.g., changelog generation, builds)
├── .github/
│   └── workflows/  # CI/CD automation (changelog, builds, releases)
└── README.md    # This file

Each implementation is self-contained, with its own dependencies, build instructions, and documentation.

Implementation Documentation

See each subdirectory for build/run instructions:

• python/README.md
• cpp/README.md
• rust/README.md

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Automation & CI/CD

• Changelogs are generated from commit history from matching commits.
• Versioning of binaries is handled by Git tags, e.g., python-vX.Y.Z, cpp-vX.Y.Z, rust-vX.Y.Z.

Reproducibility

With version tags and automated builds, you can always reproduce a specific release of any implementation, keeping track of changes, features, and bug fixes across languages.

Changelog Generation

Changelogs are generated with git cliff from commit messages.

To generate a changelog for a specific language implementation, run in git repository root:

git cliff --config=<LANG>/cliff.toml --output CHANGELOG.md

Contribution

Contributions are welcome! Please see docs/contribute.md for guidelines.

License

MIT

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to the communities that created such awesome tools like i3, and to the developers and contributors of the languages used in this project. Your work inspires and enables projects like this to exist and thrive.