Is it feasible/sensible to pass several messages to yabai at once?

[kiryph]

I have two displays and want to change the spaces of both displays at once.

$ yabai -m space --focus 6; yabai -m space --focus 1;

There is a slight time gap between both displays changing the space.

Would the time gap be reduced if yabai could accept two or more messages at once?

The syntax would be like

$ yabai -m space --focus 6 -m space --focus 1

[koekeishiya]

Possibly, yes, although I am unsure how noticeable it would be.

Currently, you spawn a yabai process to send the message to the running instance of yabai. The running instance of yabai processes the message and sends a signal to the scripting addition running inside Dock.app. These steps then happen twice in your case, as you want to change space on two displays.

Allowing multiple messages would get rid of the overhead of spawning a process the second time around.
However, allowing multiple messages also has other implications that need to be thought through, like state consistency/behaviour upon errors and error reporting; there are a couple of ways to approach this.

[FelixKratz]

In SketchyBar implementing message batching helped a lot in responsiveness and reliability. Additionally, it cleans up the configuration file a bit. I had issues with messages getting lost if there where too many at any point in time and this change also helped to reduce lost messages. I am not sure if the lost messages where due to me bricking your server client code or if this could also be still a problem in yabai.

[koekeishiya]

I had issues with messages getting lost if there where too many at any point in time and this change also helped to reduce lost messages.

This issue was fixed in yabai way back. I assume sketchybar/spacebar didn't catch up with these changes after branching.

[koekeishiya]

#1371 may be of interest, but it isn't exactly the same as what this issue is about.

[kiryph]

@koekeishiya I would like to test this. However, I have the same compilation error as #1200

I am not yet on Monterey and I do not want to upgrade my whole system just for testing this. I also do not have a Developer ID.

macOS version 11.6.8
XCode version: 13.2.1

[koekeishiya]

Hm I can build from source just fine on my Big Sur machine. With that version of Xcode your Apple SDKs should be updated to include that definition: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nsscreen/3882821-safeareainsets?language=objc

[kiryph]

Now, I could test it with following example command to change on three displays at the same time the space:

yabai -m space --focus 3 --focus 8 --focus 13

which works great.

However, I cannot quantify the speed improvement compared to
yabai -m space --focus 3; yabai -m space --focus 8; yabai -m space --focus 13