A handful of C++ libraries already exist for interprocess communication with i3wm. However, integrating them with Qt tends to require quite a lot of boilerplate. For my own projects, none of them could be integrated in a way that feels clean enough to my taste, so I decided to build my own library to do just that.

The result is qi3pc. A simple C++ library that provides idiomatic Qt bindings for i3wm's IPC interface.

Getting information from i3 is as simple as sending a message and waiting for a reply or subscribing to events and waiting for them to be triggered. This is done with the signal/slot mechanisms offered by Qt and normal C++ functions.