enwiro

Enwiro aims to make window management as useful and convenient as possible with the goal of making you more productive.

The core feature of Enwiro is connecting your window manager’s “workspace” (or similar) feature with separate environments that allow you to work with different projects or workflows.

Enwiro is window-manager-agnostic and relies on adapters to support different types of window managers and operating systems. Even if your window manager is not currently supported, it should be simple enough to create an adapter for it.

At their core, environments are simple working directories, and they might be generated using different plugins called cookbooks.

Enwiro is the successor to i3-env.

Usage

Integration with desktop environment

enwiro integrates with your desktop environment using adapters such as enwiro-adapter-i3wm. Adapters implement a set of basic features which enwiro can use in order to connect to your operating system’s graphical environment.

The adapter will provide enwiro with an environment name (based on your currently active desktop workspace). You can check your adapter’s README to know how the environment name is derived.

Currently available adapters

• enwiro-adapter-i3wm supports i3

Configuring desktop environment integration

enwiro adapters have names prefixed with enwiro-adapter- and can be installed using cargo. For example, to install an adapter for i3, you can run

cargo install enwiro-adapter-i3wm

In your configuration file, set adapter to your desired adapter. For example, to use enwiro-adapter-i3wm, set adapter to i3wm.

adapter = "i3wm"

Updating

The most convenient way to update all enwiro-related packages at once is:

cargo install-update -a

This requires cargo-update, which you can install with cargo install cargo-update.

Concepts

Environment

An environment is a local folder or a symbolic link pointing to a folder. To define an environment, create a folder or a symbolic link inside your workspaces_directory ($HOME/.enwiro_envs by default). The name of the folder or symlink will be used as the environment name.

An environment serves as a working directory for your applications, such as your terminal or your code editor. To run a command inside an environment, switch to a desktop workspace with a name matching the name of the environment you want to use and run enw wrap <COMMAND> [-- [COMMAND_ARGS]...]. If no matching environment is found but a matching recipe exists, the environment will be created automatically. If no environment or recipe is found, it will default to using your home directory.

You can also use enw activate <NAME> to switch to (or create) a workspace for a given environment. This is the complement to enw wrap: while wrap runs a command inside an environment, activate selects which environment is active in your desktop.

An environment variable ENWIRO_ENV containing the enwiro environment name will also be added before running commands with enw wrap ....

An environment could be linked to:

• Any branch of a Git repository checked out on your local computer
• A folder on a remote computer
• Any folder on your computer

Recipe

Recipes are automatically generated blueprints for environments.

While they do not exist as environments on your computer yet, you can interact with them as if they were environments and when you do so, they will be created on the fly for you.

Recipes can have a hierarchical nature. For instance, the recipe for a Git repository might refer to the main working tree of the Git repository, and serve as the “parent recipe” to recipes for creating new worktrees for the same Git repository.

Cookbook

Cookbooks are plugins that contain recipes. You can add more recipes to your enwiro by installing and configuring more cookbooks.

List of currently available cookbooks:

• enwiro-cookbook-chezmoi: Use your chezmoi source directory as an environment
• enwiro-cookbook-git: Generate environments using Git repositories
• enwiro-cookbook-github: Discover repositories from GitHub using the GraphQL API
• enwiro-cookbook-obsidian: Discover Obsidian vaults and auto-open Obsidian/Zotero on activation

Bridge

Bridges provide close integration between enwiro and other applications. A bridge translates between enwiro and an external tool’s interface, acting as glue that connects the two.

List of currently available bridges:

• enwiro-bridge-rofi: Browse and activate environments from rofi

Daemon

enw activate and enw ls need a background daemon. Some cookbooks fetch recipes over the network (the GitHub cookbook, for example), so enwiro does that work in a daemon to keep the foreground commands fast. Both commands will fail if the daemon is not running.

Start it manually:

enwiro-daemon

Or check the systemd user service:

systemctl --user status enwiro-daemon.service

• Recipes are refreshed periodically while the user is active
• SIGTERM, SIGINT, and SIGHUP all shut it down cleanly
• Runtime files live in $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/enwiro/ (or $XDG_CACHE_HOME/enwiro/run/ as fallback)

Notifications

Enwiro sends desktop notifications for important events using the system’s notification service (via notify-rust):

• Environment creation: when a new environment is cooked from a recipe
• Errors: when workspace activation or environment setup fails

This is especially useful when enwiro is triggered from a keybinding or bridge where there is no terminal to show output. If the notification service is unavailable, error messages fall back to stderr.