First Free Workspace in i3

16 Jul 2019

i3 is an excellent tiling window manager. Soon after I started using it I wanted a way to switch to the first unused workspace. I didn’t see any built in way to do this, but I knew that i3 had python bindings. The following script switches to the first unused workspace (only considering the default ones numbered 1 to 10):

#!/usr/bin/env python
"""
Find the first free workspace and switch to it

Add this to your i3 config file:
    bindsym <key-combo> exec python /path/to/this/script.py
"""
import i3

def main():
  workspaces = i3.get_workspaces()
  workints = list()
  for w in workspaces:
    workints.append(w['name'])
  for i in range(1,11):
    if str(i) not in workints:
      i3.workspace(str(i))
      break

if __name__ == '__main__':
  main()

As the documentation for the script suggests, I have the following in my i3 config file to bind the script to win+~:

bindcode $mod+49 exec python ~/.i3/firstfree.py

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