Support focus child|parent command

[nikitabobko]

State of the issue: collect use cases

Please post your use cases

[nikitabobko]

In my opinion, those are very rare features even in i3. In AeroSpace, they are even less useful because AeroSpace offers normalizations that make window navigation easier

The goal is to make AeroSpace so good that focus child | parent won't be needed

[Diamondrubix]

it is rare, but one use case is if you have 3 terminals on top of each other with another window to the right taking up the other half of the screen you can use focus to grab all 3 terminals to move them at once.

[mik3h0]

similar to @Diamondrubix, but I also want to be able to shift a stack of windows to a different workspace or monitor. Usually this is at some point in the working day when I'm done talking to humans and want to move my e-mail client and Slack out of view, and continue looking at the IDE and web browser I have open in the same workspace.

This becomes more valuable as screen size increases as well. On a 5120x1440 screen, I'll often have 3 or 4 panes spread horizontally, some of which are horizontal stacks of 2 or more windows (usually terminals). If I want to move that stack to the edge of my screen, I have to do a bit of a dance to achieve this, usually by moving other windows in the root of the tree around the stack I actually want to move. I guess this particular use case could be handled with a "move window to far right of root" command instead, but that's still moving other windows around the leaf I wish to change.

Hope this made sense

[chr15murray]

I would like to see this too and have a similar use case to those mentioned above where I want to move a stack.

As a workaround I have these to swap a focussed stack and single window which helps a bit. It essentially moves the single window through the stack and out the otherside before returning focus to the stack.

# Swap Stacks with Single
alt-shift-ctrl-h = ['focus left', 'move right', 'move right', 'focus left']
alt-shift-ctrl-l = ['focus right', 'move left', 'move left', 'focus right']

Instead of moving the focussed stack it instead moves the single node that is in the location I want the stack in. This will of course not work as expected if you are trying to swap two stacks

[grothkopp]

I'm not 100% sure there isn't another way to solve my issue, but I want focus parent to change the layout of the root container of a populated workspace.
So when I'm on my widescreen monitor I would like to have h_tiles as the root container layout and when I'm on the small build-in screen I'd like to change it to h_accordion. If there is a way without focus parent and then calling layout, please let me know!

[TJTorola]

Not sure if there is a better alternative, but as a long time i3 user starting with aerospace I do miss focus parent. Perhaps that is something that will die away over time, but specifically I think I am failing to get a workflow where I can have multiple accordians next to one another in a row. With I3 I could basically manage my workflow in a single workspace because of that depth of stacks/tabs.

That being said, this feels like a rabbit hole, because the other thing that i3 has that aerospace does not to make that whole workflow much more doable was the stack/tab UI. It allowed for visual hints about what was selected and what the current state of the tree is that isn't as possible with aerospace.