swaycycle

Cycle through all visible windows on a sway[fx] workspace including floating ones or windows in sub-containers. So it simulates the behavior of other window managers and desktop environments. Just bind the tool to ALT-tab and there you go.

Installation

Download the binary for your architecture from the release page and copy to to to some location within your $PATH.

To build the tool from source, checkout the repo and execute make. You'll need the go toolkit. Then copy the binary swaycycle to some location within your $PATH.

Configuration

Add such a line to your sway config file (e.g. in $HOME/.config/sway/config):

bindsym $mod+Tab exec ~/bin/swaycycle

Debugging

You may call swaycycle in a terminal window on a workspace with at least one another window to test it. Use the option --debug (-d) to get comprehensive debugging output. Add the option --dump (-D) to also get a dump of the sway data tree retrieved by swaycycle. You may also try --verbose (-v) to get a oneliner about the switch.

It's also possible to debug an instance executed by sway using the --logfile (-l) switch, e.g.:

bindsym $mod+Tab exec ~/bin/swaycycle -d -l /tmp/cycle.log

How does it work?

swaycycle is being executed by sway when the user presses a key (e.g. ALT-tab). It then executes:

swaymsg -t get_tree -r

to get a JSON representation of the current setup (a tree consisting of outputs, workspaces, containers and running programs).

Then it determines which workspace is the current active one and builds a list of all windows visible on that workspace, whether floating or not.

Next it determines which window is following the one in the list with the current active focus. If the active one is at the end of the list, it starts from the top.

Finally another swaymsg command is being executed to give focus to the calculated next window, e.g.:

swaymsg [con_id=14] focus

swaycycle then just exists. It does not store any state to disk.

Getting help

Although I'm happy to hear from swaycycle users in private email, that's the best way for me to forget to do something.

In order to report a bug, unexpected behavior, feature requests or to submit a patch, please open an issue on github: https://github.com/tlinden/swaycycle/issues.

Copyright and license

This software is licensed under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE version 3.

Authors

T.v.Dein

Project homepage

https://github.com/tlinden/swaycycle

Copyright and License

Licensed under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE version 3.

Author