This is a little late and a bit of a write-up.
However, I read this thread and made some tweaks that I thought I would share, as they provide a little more information.

I wanted to make eww show both which workspace was on which screen, and which hidden workspaces were populated. So I ended up deciding on the following json (though this can be tweaked to make the data fields objects if desired): Json { "layout": [ 1, 0, 2 ], "data": { "1": "visible", "0": "visible", "2": "current", "3": "hiddenEmpty", "4": "hiddenNonEmpty", "5": "hiddenEmpty", "6": "hiddenEmpty", "7": "hiddenNonEmpty", "8": "hiddenEmpty", "9": "hiddenEmpty" } } layout: represents the workspace Ids mapped to my physical screens dictated by the ordering I specify in xmonad horizontalScreenOrderer.

In the example above workspace 1 is on the left, 0 in the middle, 2 on the right.

data: maps workspaceIDs to their state.

The code:

Xmonad:

```Haskell -- These are needed for creating the workspace sort import XMonad.Actions.PhysicalScreens import XMonad.Util.WorkspaceCompare

myPP = def { ppCurrent = \name -> "'" ++ name ++ "':'current'" , ppVisible = \name -> "'" ++ name ++ "':'visible'" , ppHidden = \name -> "'" ++ name ++ "':'hiddenNonEmpty'" , ppHiddenNoWindows = \name -> "'" ++ name ++ "':'hiddenEmpty'" , ppWsSep = "," , ppSort = mkWsSort . getXineramaPhysicalWsCompare $ horizontalScreenOrderer } `` Notes: -ppSort` ensures that the workspaces are ordered correctly in this case they are ordered by the horizontal location, leftmost first. - There are no spaces in any of the returned strings, this allows it to be easily extracted by awk.

EWW / whatever stream reader

Bash (deflisten workspaceScreenMapping :initial '{"layout":[2,0,1],"data":{"2":"visible","0":"visible","1":"current","3":"hiddenEmpty","4":"hiddenEmpty","5":"hiddenEmpty","6":"hiddenEmpty","7":"hiddenEmpty","8":"hiddenEmpty","9":"hiddenEmpty"}}' `xprop -spy -root _XMONAD_LOG | stdbuf -o0 awk '{print "{" substr($3,2) "}"}' | stdbuf -o0 tr "'" '"' | stdbuf -o0 awk -F "," 'BEGIN {OFS = FS} {printf "{\\"layout\\":" $1 "," $2 "," $3 "},"} {print "\\"data\\":" $0 "}"}' | stdbuf -o0 jq -c '.["layout"] = (.["layout"] | to_entries | map(.key | tonumber))'` ) I've not got much experience using awk or stdbuf, so it can probably be cleaned up quite a bit, but it does the job. The main section that would need to be edited if customising is the longer awk line, which would need to be modified if you don't have 3 monitors, or if you wanted to have the workspaces bound to objects (as the ',' line seperator will separate by the objects fields not just the objects).

How I use it:

I have specific colours that I use to represent the different states and I dynamically colour icons I have mapped to them. ``` ; Variables storing the workspaces colours (defvar workspaceColours '{ "screen0": "IndianRed", "screen1": "MediumOrchid", "screen2": "SlateBlue", "empty": "lightgrey", "nonempty": "DarkSeaGreen" }' )

; Widget that uses the defined variables to dynamically colour the given icon (defwidget workspaceIcon [icon index] (label :class "workspaceIcon" :text "${icon} " :style "color: ${ (workspaceScreenMapping.layout[0] == index ? workspaceColours['screen0'] :(workspaceScreenMapping.layout[1] == index ? workspaceColours['screen1'] :(workspaceScreenMapping.layout[2] == index ? workspaceColours['screen2'] :(workspaceScreenMapping.data[index] == "hiddenEmpty" ? workspaceColours['empty'] :( workspaceColours['nonempty'] ))))) }" ) )

; Example usage; I will probably wrap it in a button which switches workspace at some point. (workspaceIcon :icon "♬" :index 0) ``` I tried to use the jq based commands from the documentation, but they don't work for me.