Cycling through Windows in SwayWM

Some time ago i tried Swaywm, which is one of the top tiling window managers for linux and the only tiling window manager that works well enough on Wayland (for my use case at the very least).

The only issue with it for me, was that i cannot cycle through windows like i would in any other window manager. Which was an issue for me only because

• i planned to use multiple window managers from time to time, and the default behavior for most was cycling with super+Tab
• I would occasionally use other systems that do not belong to me, and they have the same cycling behaviour.

Since Swaywm is very extensible. I wrote a little script to acheive the desired behaviour, as mentioned below.

Script {#script}

Write the script below to a file called ~/.config/sway/alttab and make it executable as chmod +x ~/.config/sway/alttab.

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import sys
import json
import subprocess

direction=bool(sys.argv[1] == 't' or sys.argv[1] == 'T')
swaymsg = subprocess.run(['swaymsg', '-t', 'get_tree'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
data = json.loads(swaymsg.stdout)
current = data["nodes"][1]["current_workspace"]
workspace = int(data["nodes"][1]["current_workspace"])-1
roi = data["nodes"][1]["nodes"][workspace]
temp = roi
windows = list()

def getNextWindow():
    if focus < len(windows) - 1:
        return focus+1
    else:
        return 0

def getPrevWindow():
    if focus > 0:
        return focus-1
    else:
        return len(windows)-1

def makelist(temp):
    for nodes in "floating_nodes", "nodes":
        for i in range(len(temp[nodes])):
            if temp[nodes][i]["name"] is None:
                makelist(temp[nodes][i])
            else:
                windows.append(temp[nodes][i])

def focused(temp_win):
    for i in range(len(temp_win)):
        if temp_win[i]["focused"] == True:
           return i

makelist(temp)
# print(len(windows))
focus = focused(windows)
if str(sys.argv[1]) == 't' or str(sys.argv[1]) == 'T':
    print(windows[getNextWindow()]["id"])
else:
    print(windows[getPrevWindow()]["id"])

Config {#config}

Add the lines given below to your ~/.config/sway/config

bindsym $mod+tab exec swaymsg [con_id=$(swaymsg -t get_tree | ~/.config/sway/alttab t)] focus
bindsym $mod+shift+tab exec swaymsg [con_id=$(swaymsg -t get_tree | ~/.config/sway/alttab f)] focus

Now restart sway. Cycling through windows should be working now.

Note {#note}

There have been some excellent contributions to this, which can be found here: https://gist.github.com/SidharthArya/f4d80c246793eb61be0ae928c9184406

References {#references}

• Sway