How to get notify working for the split toggle command for i3wm?

Question

I have this command:

bindsym $mod+q split toggle

This will toggle between hsplit and vsplit. My individual vsplit and hsplit (activated using $mod+v and $mod+h respectively) are:

bindsym $mod+h split h; exec notify-send 'tile horizontally'

bindsym $mod+v split v; exec notify-send 'tile vertically'

As you can see, these individual splits have a notify-send that pop up to tell me which split orientation is being used. How do I add that to the split toggle command above?

I tried:

bindsym $mod+q split toggle; exec notify-send 'vertical'; exec notify-send 'horizontal'

This doesnt seem to work. The split toggle command on its own does highlight the side of the window that it's being split, i.e. vertical split has right side of the window being highlighted, while horizontal split has the bottom side of the being highlighted.

However, I would like some better visual feedbacks, hence I want to get this notify-send to work.

Answer 1

What you've written essentially wants to call notify-send twice. So what you probably need to do instead is bind the key to a shell script that keeps track of the current split state (or can inquire about it) using i3-msg.