Show window icons in titlebar

[hasufell]

I generally find it hard to distinguish the type of window just based on the title. I'm wasting time reading titles and being confused about whether I'm switching to a console, browser window or something else. Workspaces alone don't fix it, they are only useful to group windows, not distinguish them visually. Icons fix this easily with little visual overhead.

There were several i3 window titlebar icon patches. Also see the screenshot.

I wasn't able to find an existing issue report about this.

[emersion]

Sorry, this isn't something we're interested in.

[hasufell]

Sorry, this isn't something we're interested in.

Why?

[emersion]

We try to keep Sway simple. You're free to add this feature to a fork of Sway if you want it.

[hasufell]

We try to keep Sway simple.

What is simple and what isn't? How is showing a text simpler than showing an icon?

[emersion]

Icon lookup is far from simple. Sway would need to implement it, then load the image (supporting multiple file formats), and render it.

[hasufell]

Wondering what #307 was about then

[vvrein]

@hasufell you could try something like this:

for_window    [app_id="(?i)firefox"]            title_format "<span foreground='#FF6611'><tt></tt></span> %title"
for_window    [app_id="Alacritty"]              title_format "<span foreground='#00FF00'><tt></tt></span> %title"
for_window    [app_id="telegramdesktop"]        title_format "<span foreground='#84b3ff'><tt></tt></span> %title"

[laur89]

Worth mentioning that upstream i3 has implemented the feature.

[brett-mahar]

As a workaround, you can name windows incorporating emojis, eg in sway's config:

for_window [title="cmus"] title_format "🔊 cmus "
for_window [title="rss"] title_format "📜 rss "

And your font has to have emoji support, eg:

font pango:Liberation Sans 21

[fluix-dev]

Worth mentioning that upstream i3 has implemented the feature.

Though this is a link to Airblader's fork, true upstream did indeed implement this in i3/i3#4439.

[emersion]

FWIW, I don't really like the idea of this feature from a technical point of view. It comes at a significant cost: using the XDG icon spec to find the icon from the app-id, then load it (we need to support a variety of file formats), then upload it to the GPU for rendering.