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Accepted
Shihab Khan
Asked: 2020-09-26 22:12:49 +0800 CST

How to launch specific programs on particular workspaces at i3 startup without assign?

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My workspace 1 is named in the i3 config file as

set $ws1 "1: Browser "

I have set up execution of Firefox at startup and assigned it to ws1 in the config file as:

# Startup appplication run
exec firefox
assign [class="Firefox"] $ws1

However, this means that whenever I open Firefox, the window opens only in ws1. I only want the startup firefox to open in ws1 and have the option to open Firefox in any other workspace of my choice as well.

Question 1: How can I do it?

Question 2: Any efficient way to do this for multiple apps?

firefox window-manager i3-wm

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You probably missed it in the excellent i3 user documentation (see 4.17), but you can achieve that with a construct as

    exec --no-startup-id i3-msg 'workspace 3; exec firefox; workspace 1'

    to start firefox on startup on workspace 3.

    It is unclear what you consider an "efficient way". You need to issue a command for any application you want to autostart. You could include multiple statements to change workspaces and launch different applications in the construct above, but at some point, you will hamper the readability of your configuration file.

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