hobar-richspace

Panel plugin for rich, configurable workspace/window visualization. A drop-in replacement for the stock workspace switcher that adds:

• Configurable per-workspace labels — number, WM name, or custom string
• Auto-icons via WM_CLASS rules — emoji, FontAwesome, Nerd Font, any Unicode glyph
• Macro-based icon rules — group app classes (browsers, file managers, IDEs) into reusable named sets, reference them from icon rules
• Window count badges — hidden, tooltip, badge, or inline display modes
• Drag-and-drop window moves — drop tasklist windows onto any workspace
• Keyboard reorder + true window swap — Ctrl+Shift+Arrow to swap workspaces
• Animated reorder transitions — gtk::Fixed container with tweened motion
• Live config reload — edit TOML, see changes without restart (uses notify watcher)
• Structured tracing → journald — journalctl -t richspace -f

Build

Requires Rust (edition 2021), GCC, pkg-config, and the GTK3 / libwnck-3 / libxfce4panel-2.0 development headers.

# Debug build (Rust staticlib + GCC final link)
just full-debug

# Release build
just full-release

# Or step by step
just release        # cargo build --release  (Rust staticlib only)
just link-release   # GCC links Rust .a + plugin.c → librichspace.so

The split exists because rustc's cdylib hides C symbols, but XFCE needs xfce_panel_module_construct exposed via dlsym(). Solution: build a Rust staticlib, then let GCC do the final shared-object link with -Wl,--whole-archive.

Note: this crate currently has path dependencies on three sibling crates (wnck-rs, spaceship-std, babel) that live in the author's monorepo. To build standalone you'll need to vendor those or rewrite Cargo.toml to point at upstream/published versions.

Install

just install        # builds release, validates symbols, installs to:
                    #   ~/.local/lib/xfce4/panel/plugins/librichspace.so
                    #   ~/.local/share/xfce4/panel/plugins/richspace.desktop
                    # then xfce4-panel -r

Then right-click the panel → Add New Items… → Rich Workspaces.

Configure

Per-instance TOML at ~/.config/xfce4/panel/richspace-N.toml (where N is the panel plugin ID). Live-reloaded on save.

[macros]
browser = ["firefox", "brave-browser", "chromium"]
fm      = ["nemo", "nautilus", "thunar"]

[[icon_rules]]
macro      = "browser"
icon       = "󰖟"
match_mode = "all"

[[icon_rules]]
class_regex = "^code$"
icon        = "󰨞"
match_mode  = "any"

Display modes (icon_only / label_only / icon_and_label), label sources (number / wm_name / custom), and window count display (hidden / tooltip / badge / inline) are all configurable. See src/config.rs for the full schema.

Logs

journalctl -t richspace -f

Log level is centralized via ~/Workspace/logging.toml and hot-reloaded on SIGHUP (e.g. pkill -HUP xfce4-panel).

License

GPL-2.0-or-later. See LICENSE.