sway-icon-to-go

Why this exists

Sway workspace labels default to whatever windows happen to be open. With a dozen apps across nine workspaces, manual renaming does not scale. This daemon keeps workspace names in sync with what is actually running — optionally as Font Awesome glyphs instead of raw app names.

Inspired by i3-workspace-names-daemon, rewritten in Go for a Sway daily driver.

How it works

A long-lived process subscribes to Sway window events via go-sway (window move, new, title, close). On each relevant event it walks the window tree, resolves app names per window, maps them to icons, and issues batched rename workspace commands — only when the formatted name actually changed.

No polling loop. The IPC connection is event-driven.

Icon resolution

1. Match window title against app-icons.yaml (exact name, then regex patterns).
2. Fall back to process name from /proc via PID.
3. Map app name → Font Awesome UTF-8 glyph via fa-icons.yaml.

An in-memory LRU cache (default capacity 50) avoids repeated map/regex lookups for hot apps. Config reload clears the cache.

Configuration

YAML files live under ~/.config/sway/ (or ~/.config/i3/ — Sway takes precedence):

File	Purpose
app-icons.yaml	App name → icon name (one-to-many, lowercase)
fa-icons.yaml	Icon name → UTF-8 code point

Generate a default fa-icons.yaml from upstream Font Awesome CSS:

sway-icon-to-go parse > ~/.config/sway/fa-icons.yaml

Hot reload without restart: pkill -HUP sway-icon-to-go

Deployment

exec sway-icon-to-go          # sway config
make install-service          # user systemd unit

Formatting flags: unique icons only (-u), name trim length (-l), separator (-d).

What it is not

Not a general Wayland compositor plugin. Sway-specific, with i3 config directory compatibility for the YAML files. Requires Font Awesome installed on the system for icon glyphs to render.