Spawn 6 windows in 2 rows in the i3 window manager

Question

How can I bind a key that spawns (via the exec command) six terminal windows? I managed to figure out how to do this, but all windows were on one row. What I would like to have is that 3 on top and 3 on bottom.

Like this,

 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
|         |         |         |
|    T1   |   T2    |    T3   |
| _ _ _ _ | _ _ _ _ | _ _ _ _ |
|         |         |         |
|    T4   |   T5    |    T6   |
| _ _ _ _ | _ _ _ _ | _ _ _ _ |

This is for the i3 window manager.

Answer 1

Note this line in the i3 User's Guide

Commands can be chained by using ; (a semicolon).

So you could first spawn your terminals and then use the appropriate layout commands to set them in the right way just like you'd do interactively.

I suppose you could also use the IPC interface (in-depth docs), i.e. bindsym some shell script calling i3-msg (with some exec command) to spawn your terminals (or use one of the IPC bindings to use Ruby/Perl/C/Python)