i3 Window Manager

[eighty2fifty1]

Has anyone attempted to use i3 window manager or anything like it to change the appearance of their screen? I have several apps that I would like to run along with OAP, but I want them visible at all times, like my airbag suspension control, camera feed, and some other stuff. I’ve had some success using xrandr to make my touchscreen think that it’s two monitors instead of one, but it won’t tile the open windows effectively. I’m going to give it a shot this weekend but I was wondering if anyone else had tried already. I was unable to find anything on the forum about it.

[eighty2fifty1]

So I've made some progress with this.  I'm able to get OAP to open in 70% of the screen, and put two more blank windows in the other 30% as a placeholder.  To do this, I installed i3 windows manager following these instructions.  Once that was done,  I edited OAP's autorun script like so.

#!/bin/bash
cd $HOME
/usr/bin/stdbuf -o0 /usr/local/bin/autoapp > /home/pi/.openauto/cache/openauto.log &
sleep 10
i3-msg '[instance="^autoapp$"] fullscreen disable'

Getting in to i3's config file, I added this to the end of it. Anything with '#' is a comment.  Yes, the splash screen still works but I did disable it while I was initially figuring this out.

# My custom mods
exec_always --no-startup-id "i3-msg 'workspace 1; append_layout /home/pi/.config/i3/workspace-1.json'"
exec_always openauto
# more apps and scripts can be added here to automatically open on startup

Finally, here are the contents of workspace-1.json

{
    // stacked split container with 1 children
    "layout": "stacked",
    "percent": 0.7,
    "type": "con",
    "nodes": [
        {
            "border": "none",
            "name": "autoapp",
            "type": "con",
            "swallows": [
                {
                    "class": "autoapp"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}
{
    // splitv split container with 2 children
    "layout": "splitv",
    "percent": 0.3,
    "type": "con",
    "nodes": [
        {
            "name": "placeholder",
            "percent": 0.5,
            "type": "con",
            "swallows": [
                {
                    "class": "placeholder",
                    "instance": "placeholder"
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "name": "placeholder",
            "percent": 0.5,
            "type": "con",
            "swallows": [
                {
                    "class": "placeholder",
                    "instance": "placeholder"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

And here is the result
   
I'll continue to update this as I go, I'm still figuring this thing out so I'll try to answer questions as best I can, but I am far from an expert here.
References:
Install Instructions
User Guide
Layout Saving

[GSPW]

Congrats, that's impressive!

Any adverse effects to report (lag, etc)?

[eighty2fifty1]

No problems yet. I'm about to get into issuing commands through my Python scripts (to make the other apps fullscreen when i touch them) so we'll see what happens with that. Right now I have a separate app for my cameras (I have more than one) and another to control my airbag suspension. The goal was to have all of them displayed along with OAP at the same time. Seems to be working so far, but I haven't installed it in the truck due to power supply issues.

[jor3l]

Does android auto stay inside that portion of the screen or takes over the whole thing? I'm removing all my car dials and physical dash so I need to always have info on the screen similar to a tesla 3, wonder if this works, I was able to get it to work but AA takes over the screen when the phone is connected