i3WM: Populate Workspace with Terminals

I recently wrote a script to populate a workspace with four terminals in i3 Window Manager, each taking up a quadrant of the screen.

Four Terminals

This script is nice because I often find myself needing multiple terminals and this saves a little bit of time by automating the process. The bash script is as follows:

#Written By Brian Winkler

#Free to use and distribute

#!/bin/bash

exec xterm &

sleep 0.3

i3-msg 'split h' &&

exec xterm &
sleep 0.3

i3-msg 'split v' &&

exec xterm &
sleep 0.3

i3-msg 'focus left' &&
i3-msg 'split v' &&
exec xterm &

exit 0

As you can see, its a simple script. I had to play around with the sleep time a bit in order to get the terminals to open in the correct configuration. '0.2' for the sleep value works about half the time, depending on the system load. I chose to go with '0.3' since it ended up being more reliable, though does has a noticeable lag.  You win some and you lose some.

To use this script, I place an executable version of the script in '/usr/local/bin' and named it 'terms'. This way, I can call this script from dmenu use it whenever I need to populate a work-space with terminals.

Well, that's all for now! I hope you find this script useful. Please free to comment or ask questions or tell me how inept I am!