One-shot window rules

[danikron]

Sometimes I would like for programs that open multiple windows to get placed on different workspaces. Such as opening a browser with two windows and sending each window to a specific workspace. This could be achieved with the ability to queue up one-shot window rules with hyprctl (similar to BSPWM).

[vaxerski]

hyprctl dispatch exec '[workspace 4] kitty'?

[danikron]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that just applies a rule to the execution of a specific application, right?

What I'm after is the ability to anticipate the opening of several windows that I want distributed to different workspaces. Say I open my browser and my previous session had 2 windows. Then I would like to be able to queue up 2 rules, so that the first window that opens ends up on workspace 1 and the second on workspace 2.

Since I don't have a way to distinguish the windows (that I know of) I would need one-shot rules for this so that once the first rule is triggered it is cleared.

[vaxerski]

you could use a script for this, idk, seems like a giga edge case

[danikron]

It seems to me like something everyone should want to to be able to do, but you may well be right that it's actually very niche.
I'll try to figure out a good way to script it. Do you have any tips for me?

[danikron]

Actually, I managed to work out a functional solution. Perhaps not the most elegant, so if you have any better ideas I'd love to hear them. Regardless, I'm satisified that I can handle this case without extra functionality in Hyprland. Thank you for taking the time to respond.

#! /bin/sh

handle() {
  ((failsafeCounter++))
    case $1 in
      openwindow*'Zen Browser')
        ((zenWindowCounter++))
        if [[ $zenWindowCounter = 2 ]]; then
          secondWindowAddress=$(grep -oP '(?<=>>).*(?=,.+,zen)' <<< $1)
          hyprctl dispatch movetoworkspacesilent name:F1,address:0x$secondWindowAddress
          kill $(pgrep -P $$ socat)
        fi
        break
        ;;
      esac
      if [[ $failsafeCounter -gt 50 ]]; then
        kill $(pgrep -P $$ socat)
      fi
}

if pgrep -x zen-bin > /dev/null; then
  echo 'Zen Browser is already running.'
  exit 1
fi

zenWindowCounter=0
failsafeCounter=0
hyprctl dispatch exec '[workspace 1] /usr/bin/zen-browser'
socat -U - UNIX-CONNECT:$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/hypr/$HYPRLAND_INSTANCE_SIGNATURE/.socket2.sock | while read -r line; do handle "$line"; done