Way to collect a set of windows into a group

Kerfuffle
1

I want my various chat apps to all load into a tabbed group. But I can’t see how to push them into a given group, all the dispatch options to put into a group rely on them being in a given spatial relationship, which isn’t going to be reliable.

Is there something I’m missing?

2

Yes, you can define workspace rules. you have to define the windows then create the rules around them for example (small example)

5 – Steam main client/library on workspace 5
6 wr({
7 name = “steam-main-workspace-5”,
8 match = {
9 class = “^([Ss]team)$”,
10 title = “^([Ss]team|Steam)$”,
11 },
12 workspace = “5 silent”,
13 float = true,
14 size = “1280 800”,
15 move = “1264 625”,
16 })
17 – Steam child popups stay floating
18 wr({
19 name = “steam-popups-float”,
20 match = {
21 class = “^([Ss]team)$”,
22 title = “negative:^([Ss]team|Steam)$”,
23 },
24 float = true,
25 center = true,
26 })
28 – Steam games on workspace 4
29 wr({
30 name = “steam-games-workspace-4”,
31 match = {
32 class = “^(steam_app_[0-9]+)$”,
33 },
34 workspace = “4 silent”,
35 no_blur = true,
36 })
37
38 – Game workspace 4
39 wr({
40 name = “gamescope-workspace-4”,
41 match = {
42 class = “^(gamescope)$”,
43 },
44 workspace = “4 silent”,
45 no_blur = true,
46 })

this would designate steam for example in the exact location and size and subsequent rules for games to spawn on a different workspace.. you can do t for groups and im pretty sure special workspaces as well. i jsut dont have an example on hand and the wife is rushing me to bed.

3

I want my various chat apps to all load into a tabbed group.

You may be interested in the dispatcher requested here:

4

So the small answer is “no, there is no way to move a window into a specific group” :frowning:

Hopefully that feature request does make some progress.

I’m thinking I might be able to kludge it with moving them all to a special workspace, move all windows in that special workspace into one group, move the group back to the current workspace.

5

i mean yes and no…like i said you can define workspace rules so you can specifically get the name of whatever windows you want grouped up and create a special rule that puts them in a specific order in a specific place…like i showed with steam above.. i could shrink that down and also make a bind that would open them all in whatever workspace at whatever size i want.. its really just bound by your imagination and how much effort you put into trying to achieve what you want..

6

I don’t think a rule based method will work, as I want them in a tabbed group, which can only be applied at creation, not later. And firefox windows have an initial title of “Firefox” so I can’t distinguish between different browser windows to pick out the two that I want in the tabs.

But some manipulation later I have:

function gather()
    local workspace_tmp = "special:chat"

    -- Move the chat windows onto the temp workspace
    for _, window in pairs(hl.get_windows()) do
        if (window.title == "Google Messages for web — Mozilla Firefox"
                or window.class == "slack"
                or window.class == "signal"
                or (window.class == "firefox" and string.find(window.title, "^Element.*"))) then
            hl.dsp.window.fullscreen_state({ window = window, internal = 0, client = 2 })
            hl.dispatch(hl.dsp.window.move({ workspace = workspace_tmp, follow = true, window = window }))
            hl.dispatch(hl.dsp.window.move({ into_or_create_group = "l", window = window }))
            hl.dispatch(hl.dsp.window.move({ into_or_create_group = "u", window = window }))
            hl.dispatch(hl.dsp.window.move({ into_or_create_group = "r", window = window }))
            hl.dispatch(hl.dsp.window.move({ into_or_create_group = "d", window = window }))
        end
    end

    -- Move the tabbed group back onto workspace 1
    hl.dispatch(hl.dsp.window.move({
        window = hl.get_windows({ workspace = workspace_tmp }).first,
        follow = true,
        workspace = 1
    }))
end

hl.bind("CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + C", gather,
    { description = "Gather the chat windows and put them in a tabbed group on the first workspace" })

Which works how I want, except that the group coming back to workspace 1 doesn’t honour smart_split :frowning:. But that is very minor, this is a big improvement.

FYI: there might be a better way to do it, but if I only use 1 move into group direction, I sometimes end up with 2 tabbed groups instead of one. The ‘redundant’ lines avoid that.

A move_into_named_group would be so much nicer.