i3-autoname VS i3ipc-python

You need to do some scripting to achieve that. Check out wmctrl and i3-msg commands. If you are into bash, take a look at my auto ws rename solution. What I’d do is write a script that does the check, startup and ws switching, and bind that to your workspace shortcut. Easier is just to autostart them on the preferred workspace if ram is not an issue.

i3ipc-python seems to do what I want -- it even has a script specifically for this -- and for existing windows moving to the space I think I can just use the binding.

Any reason not to use i3ipc-python? The module will talk over the ipc socket rather than calling out to (relatively expensive) i3-msg subprocesses to do it.

Untested but with i3ipc-python you should be able to write a script something like this:

here you go, there's more stuff on the arch wiki

And this is the specific script to focus the last focused workspace https://github.com/altdesktop/i3ipc-python/blob/master/examples/focus-last.py

Looks good, if you want to go even further you could replace calls to swaymsg with a python implementation python-i3ipc / i3ipc-python

I could probably use the i3ipc-python (https://github.com/altdesktop/i3ipc-python) library (which works with both i3 and Sway) to make a Sway-specific implementation, but then it would be up to other people to implement support for things like KDE Wayland and Gnome Wayland.

This is kind of interesting for me. I ran into a problem with spotify, I couldn't assign it to its proper workspace... The reason was because spotify does not put proper values in at startup (sometimes it manages, but mostly not), in bspwm there were subscribe that just dumped data out. I3 you can subscribe as well, but it seems they want you to use more libraries. I found this https://i3wm.org/docs/ipc.html, through that I found https://github.com/altdesktop/i3ipc-python, installed it with

The end goal is to make something that interacts with https://github.com/altdesktop/i3ipc-python, or something similar, so I'm fine with something closer to a library.