Is it possible to limit conky to only one workspace in Sway?

[Toraalv]

I usually have my terminal a little transparent so that I can see my wallpaper, though with conky it kind of gets in the way. Since this is Sway specific I understand if conky has no support for this.

I see two options:

1. make everything opaque
2. write a script that kills conky on every workspace except one

I don't like either of them but I guess the second option would work, although jank.

[Caellian]

Wayland support is very limited still. But I don't think this kind of use case falls into the category of Conky responsibility anyway. Conky can't tell which workspace it's on at the moment.

We could possibly support something like ext-workspace-v1 protocol down the line and provide workspace information through lua and variables, though that's only supported by cosmic atm.

In general (and for sway), this information is private to the compositor and not exposed to applications. Some of them have control clis that can be used for something like this (like hyprctl) but I don't calling those from conky would be a good design decision. I'd prefer the option where we provide a patch with our custom protocol for each WM directly instead of having to maintain compatibility with external CLI outputs.

[Toraalv]

Understandable. Thank you for responding!

[Toraalv]

For anyone having the same question and wanting some kind of solution, I made this bash script:

#!/bin/bash

# '1' is the workspace where conky will be "limited" to
# change it to anything you want (alphanumeric is ok)
if [ "$1" != 1 ]; then
	pkill -x conky
elif ! pgrep -x conky > /dev/null 2>&1; then
	conky --daemonize # either --daemonize or set 'background = true' in your conky config
fi

# switch to the workspace specified by the arg '$1'
swaymsg workspace "$1"

You'll also have to add this to your sway config:

	bindsym $mod+1 exec /path/to/script 1
	bindsym $mod+2 exec /path/to/script 2
	bindsym $mod+3 exec /path/to/script 3
	bindsym $mod+4 exec /path/to/script 4
	bindsym $mod+5 exec /path/to/script 5
	bindsym $mod+6 exec /path/to/script 6
	bindsym $mod+7 exec /path/to/script 7
	bindsym $mod+8 exec /path/to/script 8
	bindsym $mod+9 exec /path/to/script 9
	bindsym $mod+0 exec /path/to/script 10

and remove any previous bindings. Remember to make the script executable with chmod +x /path/to/script

Maybe crude but it works. Performance wise it seems okay.