Thank you kindly. Cool, I see we had about the same solution of handling workspaces and their switching, conceptually.

I use this bash script, currently:

#!/bin/bash
print_workspaces() {
  i3-msg -t get_workspaces \
    | jq -c 'map({num,name,visible,focused,urgent,empty:false}) + ([range(1;11)] | map({num:.,name:.,visible:false,focused:false,urgent:false,empty:true})) | unique_by(.num)'
}
print_workspaces
if [ "$1" = subscribe ]
then
  i3-msg -m -t subscribe '["workspace"]'
| \
    while read
    do
      print_workspaces
    done
fi

I also want to print numbers for workspaces that don't exist (yet) so that there's more consistency in the bar numbers. I guess I'm getting old...