What do you mean with persistent workspaces?

hm, probably not the right term for it, but the workspace display in the pager does not show empty workspaces. so if I have windows open in workspaces 1, 3 and 7 e.g. they would be indistinguishable from windows open in workspaces 1, 2 and 3. xmonad does this right, it has all available workspaces displayed in the pager at all times.

There's an open PR that will make this possible.

that's awesome! do you reckon the pr is going to get accepted? I definitely remember reading discussions of this issue in the past and seeing a firm "we don't want this feature in i3" response.

The PR is coming from one of the core maintainers, so yes, it will be accepted.

It doesn't just implement this specific feature, though. It provides a more general approach for i3bar that enables this and many other use cases. This struck us as a good and flexible solution we can get behind.

Assign workspace to specific screen->assign specific window/program to workspace and area within the workspace ->set i3 to open whatever programs/windows you want on start up and they're automatically arranged. That's more or less my set up and it's pretty persistent as far as I can tell?