Support for dynamic workspace show/hide protocol (similar to i3bar)

[ymolists]

Hi folks 👋

Recently, i3 added support for dynamically showing or hiding workspaces. The way it works is quite simple — i3bar forks a shell command and displays whatever list of workspaces the command returns. This allows users to define their own logic for which workspaces are visible at any time . I3 documention can be found here 👉 i3bar-workspace-protocol

The protocol is extremely lightweight: any tool that can output a JSON array to stdout can drive it. I managed to implement this quickly in Go, and the i3 examples even show how to do it from a simple bash script — which highlights how approachable this feature is.

In practice, this allows for much cleaner and more focused workspace setups. For example, I can have one group of workspaces for dev, and another for {client-a, client-b, ...} — with all irrelevant workspaces hidden when I switch context. It really helps reduce distraction.

I brought this up with the Hyprland folks here:
👉 hyprwm/Hyprland#11908

Their feedback was that this kind of functionality would need to be implemented at the bar level, not in Hyprland itself.

So I wanted to ask the Waybar community:

1. Does Waybar currently support something like i3bar’s dynamic workspace protocol?
2. If not, would there be interest in adding such support?
3. Would implementing this require any cooperation or changes on Hyprland’s side, or could it be fully handled by the bar?

Thanks for your time and for maintaining this awesome project!