i3 touch menu - a polybar module collection

Using a tiling window manager makes a lot of sense for a tablet. While that may seem unintuitive at first -- think about it: Android, iOS and Windows 10's tablet mode all use tiling wms. Thus, i3 is an excellent wm for tablets running GNU/Linux. The problem is that i3 is designed to be used with a keyboard, without a mouse, so there are no touch controls built in. For the many of us who use polybar with i3, I've put together a menu with some useful touch commands. You'll want to customize them to make sure they work for your setup, but many of these should be reusable as-is. More on configuration below.

Before you install

Assuming you already have polybar installed, you'll also need fontawesome.

You'll probably want an on-screen keyboard as well. By default, the keyboard button provided by this repo is set up to use onboard, which works well with i3 out of the box. More on configuration below.

Installation

First, you'll want to configure polybar to work with font-awsome by putting something like this in your ~/.config/polybar/config

font-3 = FontAwesome5Free:style=Solid:pixelsize=18:antialias=false;3
font-4 = FontAwesome5Brands:style=Solid:pixelsize=18:antialias=false;3

You can, of course, choose your own font size and other settings.

Next, you'll want to copy the contents of i3touchmenu, touchredraw, touchvolume, touchbrightness and touchkeyboard from this repo into ~/.config/polybar/config. You may only want some of these, but not all. In that case, just pick the ones you want.

Next, you'll want to initialize in ~/.config/polybar/config by adding the names of these modules to modules-left, modules-right, or modules-center. You'll notice some of the icons are in quotes and have spaces around them. This is based on my own spacing preferences, and assumes that the modules will be added in the following order:

i3touchmenu touchredraw touchvoldown touchvolup touchbrightdown touchbrightup touchkeyboard

If you use a different order, the spacing will look off, so you'll want to change this to get it looking the way you want. Personally, I add these to modules-center. If you are going to do this as well, you may want to set fixed-center = true, so that the icons don't move around when your other modules change size.

Configuration

When you're setting your own configurations, make sure to refer to the polybar wiki pages on configuation and modules. These pages provide some very helpful information.

touchkeyboard

I use onboard as my on-screen keyboard, and it works fairly well with i3 out of the box. I've configured onboard using onboard-settings to start hidden, and I launch it when i3 starts up by adding this to my ~/.config/i3/config:

exec --no-startup-id onboard &

This will also launch a tray icon that you can click to show and hide onboard. However, I prefer to have an additional button for this next to my other touch controls, rather than just in the tray.

touchvolume and touchbrightness

I use pactl for audio controls and xbacklight for brightness. If you use something else, you will want to configure with the approriate commands. You can also adjust the increments/decrements from within the command.

Launcher menu

In i3touchmenu, you will see that I've built a launcher sub-menu for launching a couple applicaitons which I use frequently. This is more of a reference than anything. You'll definitely want to add/remove/modify the entries in this menu so they launch the apps that you want them to.

Working with fontawesome

When you are configuring these modules, you'll find that working with fontawsome can be a pain. If you use rofi (or are willing to install it for this purpose), I highly recommend using this tool to make your life easier. I use launch it using the following command (which I've bound to a keyboard shortcut in i3):

/path/to/rofi-fontawesome/fontawesome-menu/fontawesome-menu -f /path/to/rofi-fontawesome/fontawesome-menu/fa5-icon-list.txt -o '-i -columns 4'

Features/Usage

This section goes through each module and explains what each button does (going left to right).

i3touchmenu

• Open menu
  • Close menu
  • Launch
    • Back to main menu
    • chromium
    • urxvt
  • Move
    • Back to main menu
    • Left
    • Right
    • Up
    • Down
  • Layout
    • Back to main menu
    • Split
    • Stacking
    • Tabbed
    • Toggle floating
  • Split
    • Back to main menu
    • Vertical
    • Horizontal
  • Resize
    • Back to main menu
    • Grow height
    • Shrink height
    • Grow width
    • Shrink width
  • Move to workspace
    • Back to main menu
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5
    • 6
    • 7
    • 8
    • 9
    • 10
  • Kill
    • Back to main menu
    • Kill
  • Power
    • Back to main menu
    • Screen off
    • Lock
    • Reboot
    • Shutdown

touchredraw

• Restart i3 in order to redraw polybar to fit screen orientation

touchvolume

• Mute
• Volume up
• Volume down

touchbrightness

• Brightness down
• Brightness up

touchkeyboard

• Open onscreen keyboard (onboard)

Polybar issues

There are a few issues with polybar which need some special explanation.

Rotation

If you use a tablet, you likely enable screen rotation. The problem is, polybar does not adjust it's width when you rotate the screen with xrandr. Hence, the touchredraw module. Clicking on this button will pass the restart command to i3 (what happens when you press $mod+Shift+r, assuming you're using the default keybinding). Using this command will, cause polybar to be redrawn to match the appropriate screen dimensions. It's not the fastest or most elegant solution, but the best I've been able to come up with so far.

Running commands from polybar

You'll need to be careful to make sure any processes you launch from polybar are launched as background processes (i.e., they end with &). If run as a foreground process (i.e., without & at the end), then launching a process will cause polybar to be unresponsive to any further input until the process terminates.