Blogument BSPWM Zoom rules

content/posts/2021-12-02-bspwm-zoom-float.md

+---
+title: "Making Zoom Notifications/Windows Float on BSPWM"
+description: "How to get BSPWM to handle Zoom notification windows as floating windows, instead of tiles."
+date: 2021-12-02T18:33:54+0000
+tags:
+- "blogumentation"
+- "bspwm"
+- "zoom"
+license_code: "Apache-2.0"
+license_prose: "CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0"
+image: "https://media.jvt.me/8370d97494.png"
+slug: bspwm-zoom-float
+---
+I use the tiling window manager [BSPWM](https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm) as window manager for my Linux installation, and have done for most of the time I've been running Linux as my daily driver.
+
+Since Zoom became more prevalent for videoconferencing - especially during the pandemic - I've been getting slowly more annoyed by the way that Zoom operates with it, by default.
+
+This occurs, for instance when a participant starts screen sharing, at which point a full-size tile appears, taking the focus from the window I was previously on, and disappearing shortly after.
+
+After almost two years of getting annoyed by this, this afternoon I finally started looking at it, and found [this reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/bspwm/comments/hsqpi4/change_window_state_based_on_the_initial_size_of/) which was looking to solve it.
+
+Unfortunately that wasn't quite what I wanted, but after digging around on GitHub, I've found that [Alex Lushpai's configuration on GitHub](https://github.com/gwinn/deploy/blob/7de5948362e50dad87d41f752affc3c86789a80d/user/.config/bspwm/bspwmrc#L30), which I've amended to be:
+
+```sh
+bspc rule -a zoom state=floating center=on follow=on border=off
+```
+
+Which when put into my `bspwmrc`, now Zoom windows don't get in the way!