i3-back

An i3/Sway utility to switch focus to your last focused window. Allows for behavior similar to Alt+Tab on other desktop environments.

Features:

• Can switch between your 2 most recent windows
  • Runs a daemon (background process) to listen for focus changes
• Supports i3 and Sway
• Supports floating windows
• Can be binded to any key through i3's bindsym

Demo

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2672503/221384419-3d62413d-8987-4147-82bc-5e87cea8bb90.mp4

Installation

i3-back requires i3/Sway and D-Bus (you very likely have it already installed and running). You can verify it's installed with dbus-daemon --version and if it's running with systemctl status dbus.

i3-back is written in Rust. It can be installed through many method:

• Cargo (Rust's package manager) package:

  cargo install i3-back

• Arch Linux from the AUR (i3-back-bin):

  ``` yay -S i3-back-bin # Or with paru or other AUR wrappers

  Or manually: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ArchUserRepository#Installingandupgrading_packages

  ```

• Debian/Ubuntu as a deb from GitHub releases

• Binary from GitHub releases

Setup

In your i3/Sway configuration (~/.config/i3/config/~/.config/sway/config):

```

Start the daemon which listens to focus changes

exec --no-startup-id ~/.cargo/bin/i3-back start

Bind a switch key, which focuses the previously focused window

bindsym $mod+Tab exec ~/.cargo/bin/i3-back switch ```

Replace ~/.cargo/bin with wherever the i3-back binary is placed if not installed through Cargo.

How it works

The daemon (i3-back start) has 2 purposes:

• First, listen for i3 window events. When a window event is received, i3-back records the previously focused window ID
• Second, it opens a D-Bus server. This allows the client (i3-back switch) to send a command to switch to the previously focused window ID

When the client (i3-back switch) is called, it calls the daemon through D-Bus to execute the focus switch.