I3-SAVE-TREE(1)

📦
version 4.25.1 · 8 versions
, in fedora 43, fedora 44, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

✨ I3-SAVE-TREE(1) ✨

okay bestie, welcome to the i3-save-tree manual page 💖 this one lives in the User Contributed Perl Documentation section of your man pages, and it's genuinely one of the most useful little tools in the i3 universe. no cap.

🎀 NAME 🎀

i3-save-tree — save (parts of) the layout tree for restoring 🫶

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

i3-save-tree [--workspace=name|number] [--output=name]

that's it. that's the whole vibe. two optional flags and you're off 💅

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so what does it actually do? it dumps a workspace — or an entire output, if that's what you're feeling — straight to stdout. and the tea is: the data it spits out is supposed to be edited a bit by a human before you use it. it's giving rough draft, not final form 🙈 so don't just blindly pipe it somewhere and call it a day.

then, later, you feed that (edited!) file to i3 via the append_layout command. iconic.

and what does append_layout do with it? bestie, it's so cool. it creates placeholder windows, all arranged in the exact layout that your input file specifies. the way that works: each container should have a swallows specification. then, when a window gets mapped (aka made visible on the screen) and it matches that specification, i3 will slot it right into that place and kill the placeholder. yes, the placeholder literally gets deleted the moment the real thing shows up. main character energy ✨

oh and if you pass neither argument? it just uses the currently focused workspace. chill. defaults are your friend 🍓

👑 OPTIONS 👑

  • --workspace=name|number — specifies the workspace that should be dumped, e.g. 1. and yes, it can be either a name or the number of a workspace — whichever you vibe with. 🌈
  • --output=name — specifies the output that should be dumped, e.g. LVDS-1. this is the big one, the whole monitor, the entire ~situation~. 💜

⭐ VERSION ⭐

Version 0.1 — baby version, but she's doing great.

💅 AUTHOR 💅

Michael Stapelberg, "<michael at i3wm.org>" 🫶

Copyright 2013 Michael Stapelberg.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the BSD license.

lowkey important: that's the BSD license, fr fr. read it before you go redistributing things, bestie. 💖

and that's the whole page!! 🎀 go forth and save those trees, you absolute legend. this was i3-save-tree(1) from perl v5.40.0, dated 1980-01-01 — yeah that date is older than everyone we know but it's iconic so we keep it. mwah 💋✨

📦 where this page comes from