Sway

When I started to configure Sway, I found a lot of configurations online, but mostly were exactly the same. I too based my configuration on the given example, but disgressed quite a bit.

In my Sway configuration I have two lines that start an application in a specific way: bindsym Mod4+e exec ~/.config/sway/run-or-raise Emacs emacs bindsym Mod4+w exec ~/.config/sway/run-or-raise Firefox firefox What does this do? First, the “exec” clause calls a python script, run-or-raise. This python scripts wants two arguments. The first one is a container name. It uses swaymsg -t get_tree to get all outputs, work spaces and containers. And then it looks for any container (that is: application, Wayland client) that matches the name.

When I start Sway, I’d like to have Emacs on the left side of workspace 1, and a terminal (here Alacritty) on the right side, Unfortunately, this ~/.config/sway/config except won’t work: exec emacs exac alacritty Because alacritty starts much faster than Emacs. So I’d get the terminal on the right side of the screen. And Emacs on the left. Not good. Instead, I do this: exec emacs for_window [class="^Emacs$"] exec sh -c 'pgrep -x alacritty >/dev/null || alacritty' for_window [app_id="^emacs$"] exec sh -c 'pgrep -x alacritty >/dev/null || alacritty' That is, I start Emacs.