During the still-ongoing Covid-19 epidemic the Zoom video conferencing app/service has been a lifeline for many, many people, including myself; I’m using Zoom several times a week. I AM very grateful to the Zoom team for making a version for Linux, too, and including Arch as an officially supported Linux distribution.
However, there’s one design ‘feature’ in Zoom which makes me grimace: the multi-window/multi-popup user interface. I firmly think that it is a bad UI design principle in all cases, but worse, it makes life very difficult for the tiling window manager users. I use Awesome window manager on the desktop and i3wm on the laptop, so you can guess where this is going…
One way to tame Zoom on these wm’s is to configure most, if not all, Zoom windows as floating, but that still leaves the annoying and unnecessary ‘informative’ popups (“John Doe has started screen sharing” and so like), which steal mouse and keyboard focus while present. I cooked up a special configuration for those popups to kill them instantly, so they never have a chance to disturb the user. (NOTE: these window rules are not perfect: due to Zoom design. they may kill windows which should be left untouched, and as a side-effect, make Zoom a ‘start-in-tray’ app, which may, or may not be desirable.)
Let’s start with Awesome. These rules go to rc.lua inside the awful.rules.rules = {}-section.
-- Kill Zoom popups{ rule = { class = "zoom", instance = "zoom", name = "zoom" },
callback = function (c)
c:kill()
end },
Then, it’s i3 time. The lines below set everything else except the main window floating. They belong to .config/i3/config
for_window [class="^zoom$"] floating enable
for_window [class="zoom" instance="zoom" title="zoom"] kill
for_window [class="^zoom$" title="Zoom Meeting"] floating disable
