I used to be all in on Apple. On macOS I had a little program called Magnet to snap windows to sides and corners, and on my iPad (with external keyboard) I SSH’d into a VPS to write and run code there. I used Alfred and had all kinds of workflows in there. I thought it was great.<p>But then during my AI studies I wanted some beefier hardware, which was just not affordable for me within Apple’s ecosystem, plus they only used AMD graphics cards. I built a desktop computer that outperformed the top of the line Mac Pro for a fraction of the cost and turned it into a Hackintosh. Two weeks later Mojave came out, and Apple never approved any Nvidia drivers from then on.<p>My eyes opened to Linux and i3 in particular, which looked like Magnet taken to the extreme. What had taken me hours to install and configure on macOS (GPU-acceleration for PyTorch, for example) just worked with one package install on Linux. All my expensive apps were replaced with simple and free, much more configurable alternatives. At first I spent a day or two getting things just right. Since then not much has changed because not much needed changing, which I really like.<p>Now I look at macOS and iOS and cringe how locked down it all is. Users are very creative in their workarounds to make it work, but it is ultimately quite silly that you need to use special URL schemes and workflows to open a text file across different apps.<p>Thanks, i3!
One of my favorite things about i3 is that it doesn't force itself on you when it's not needed. You can keep it "in the background" in tabbed mode, effectively using it like a non-tiling WM, as long as you want. Just let your windows pile up and switch between them with fuzzy search (rofi/Switcheroo). Then, once usage patterns emerge, you can tile to take advantage of spatial memory.<p>Example:<p>- Start i3 in tabbed mode<p>- Open a window for coding<p>- Open a browser to search for some coding question. It opens in a new i3 tab, filling the screen like it would in a non-tiling WM<p>- Open a terminal to try the sample code (new i3 tab)<p>- Google the error message you get (new i3 tab)<p>- Use rofi to search for "code" and press Enter. Your coding window tab is activated and the coding window fills the screen<p>- Realizing the sample code you found would be useful here, along with the test terminal, tile those windows alongside your coding window. Now you can quickly refer to them and switch between them with spatial keybindings<p>- Switch back to the error message browser using rofi to check something. It's not part of your core workflow right now, so don't worry about tiling it<p>That's probably obvious to anyone who's used a tiling WM for any length of time, but tiling was daunting to me until it clicked. I spent too much time thinking about optimal window arrangements. Thinking of tiling as an optional finishing touch rather than a focal point made it much more useful/practical.
My brand new laptop was stolen while I was in school and I had to finish the year with a used 10-inch netbook I borrowed from a friend. Because of the tiny display and underpowered processor I had to get creative, I installed Arch plus i3 and it worked like a charm. In fact, I noticed my productivity actually went up. Eventually I got a new laptop, I switched off Arch to Ubuntu but I've been using i3 ever since.<p>If you're an i3 user here are a couple cool things to check out:<p>- scratchpad [1]: Little known i3 feature. Let's you put individual windows in a scratch workspace and then pull them up quickly over your regular workspaces. Really useful docs and things like that, I keep my time tracker in a scratch workspace.<p>- rofi [2]: This is a dmenu replacement with a nicer interface that lets you combine lists of commands in a single search window. I have it configured so I can search through my open windows by title or run any program from the same interface.<p>[1]: <a href="https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_scratchpad" rel="nofollow">https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_scratchpad</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://github.com/davatorium/rofi" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/davatorium/rofi</a>
I used i3 for a while when unity had a really annoying multi-touch bug I <i>could not</i> work around.<p>The thing is? I never used much more than a simple L/R split that was available in any OS / WM forever. If I wanted to split more, it was usually in the terminal, and done via tmux or the term app.<p>Add to this, a full desktop environment will handle all sorts of things for you like brightness, volume controls, proper locking on sleep, a easily configurable toolbar, hot plugging an external display, etc. i3 handles <i>none</i> of these! It's left up to the user to google around and find a brightness command that actually works, or why pauctrl is muted on startup, or why the lock screen only locks on resume, not sleep, thus flashing your screen. It's death by a thousand cuts. I know i3 is a window manager, and it's 'not it's job' to handle this stuff, supposedly, but why could they not add the most common way people control brightness, volume, etc to the default config, and let people swap it all out if they wanted? It's a really frustrating experience.<p>For myself, I've went back to gnome. If someday I get a <i>really</i> massive display that benefits from complex tiling, I'll revisit i3, but I'll probably wind up using that awesome material shell for gnome and calling it a day.<p><a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/c8le62/gnome_materialshell_beta/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/c8le62/gnome_mate...</a>
I've been using i3 for about six months or so now, and the biggest thing I've realized is that Alt+Tab as a way to switch between windows is such a frustrating approach to window management. Once you have more than two windows I need to switch between, I am constantly losing track of which one is next in the queue.<p>i3 (and other tiling managers) let you more easily navigate between windows by using their <i>location</i>. I can switch to the window to the left, or to the right, or use i3's tabbed interface to navigate windows similar to a browser, or switch between workspaces. But the point is, the windows are always in the same order, in the same location (unless I move them), so I find it so much easier to quickly switch between them.
I love i3, but I dislike manually positioning windows. I much prefer dwm[0], which will do window arrangements for you. The tagging features are also much more robust than virtual desktops ("mail folders" vs "gmail tags" is a perfect analogy - you can assign multiple tags to a window, and display any arbitrary combination of tags on the screen at a time).<p>That said, in spite of my alignments with dwm's ui principles, for the last five years I've almost exclusively used i3. Unlike dwm, I don't have to modify C code in order to configure my window manager, and I don't have to pull in patches that haven't been upstreamed[1] in order to include basic features.<p>I think there's room for a window manager with the ease of configurability found in i3, but the dynamic tiling (i3 is _static tiling_, which means the wm will not assist you in positioning windows) and tagging features of dwm. I would move to it in a heartbeat.<p>[0]: <a href="https://dwm.suckless.org/" rel="nofollow">https://dwm.suckless.org/</a>
[1]: <a href="https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/" rel="nofollow">https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/</a>
Probably an unpopular opinion here, but I do not understand why people prefer tiling window managers. I prefer to have lots of windows open, and being able to position them how I want with the size I want greatly increases my productivity. Tiling window managers makes you conform to their way of working.
I've been on I3 with nixOS (and emacs as my go to editor) for a few years now, and it's a dream. I can carry my configurations between machines with almost no setup. Every computer I use is the same.<p>I find Windows and macOS painful to use. Constantly hunting around for applications I have open, that requires me to remove my fingers from my keyboard and play around with my mouse. I barely bother to use tabs for anything (terminal or browser), just switch to another workspace and pop up another instance of FireFox or a terminal.<p>TWM do ruin you though. Once you're comfortable in them, you'll never want to go back and so using somebody else's computer just feels alien.
I love i3 (though would switch to sway in a heartbeat if they sorted hidpi and xwayland together). Its only major flaw in my mind is that you will never be able to use someone else’s computer without feeling a seething frustration that it isn’t running i3 with your config...
For those wanting to try this without building a sane config from scratch regolith might be a nice option. Very easy install on Ubuntii, well thought out and built-in cheat sheet.<p><a href="https://regolith-linux.org/" rel="nofollow">https://regolith-linux.org/</a>
Used i3 fulltime for more than a year. It's great for building extremely lightweight environments that will run on any machine.<p>The productivity side of it is slightly exaggerated (in terms of tiling vs stacking manager), and i didn't find myself saving so much time. One thing i've always missed from the stacking manager is the window overlap - i do that quite often, especially when reading something while doing stuff on another window - most sites have side panels that don't react well to changing window sizes and with stacking window, you can just place them optimally and hide the stuff you don't want to see.<p>The only issue i've had with it is how it handled popups. For example the andoid emulator window was a pain, also some dialog windows.<p>I don't think i will be ever coming back to tiling WMs. It was nice infatuation.
Ever since installing Arch + i3 on my old Macbook Pro years ago, traditional window managers feel so inferior now. I've been on the hunt, since, to find anything as close to i3 for MacOS as possible.<p>I did come close however...there's a hidden gem called Yabai[0] (formerly chunkwm) by koekeishiya on GitHub. For anyone looking for as close to i3 functionality as possible in MacOS, Yabai is definitely it. I'm really surprised I don't see more people recommend it as the developer has done an excellent job trying to bring the i3 experience to Mac.<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai</a>
See also <a href="https://swaywm.org" rel="nofollow">https://swaywm.org</a> which seeks to implement i3 for wayland<p>> Sway is a tiling Wayland compositor and a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager for X11. It works with your existing i3 configuration and supports most of i3's features, plus a few extras.
i3 is great and makes Linux usable for me. Some people have asked here why people prefer tiling window managers. I don't — I'd much rather be able to position windows as I want them on the screen. But for some inexplicable reason the world has decided that computers can't be tasked with REMEMBERING where our windows were. This is particularly egregious on Linux, where every time you open an app (or the app opens a window), the first thing you have to do is resize the window.<p>Given this failure (I still have no idea why we think our computers can't handle remembering where windows should be), it's better to have a tiling window manager, because at least one doesn't have to hunt for the window borders (which, in another failure of common sense, are becoming thinner and smaller every year) and resize the windows.
I've used i3 for several years[0], and it's one of my favorite window managers out there. I had a couple of failed attempts on Debian/Ubuntu but NixOS made it so easy to switch to i3 and use XFCE as the desktop environment, which is great when you want to use i3 but not worry about setting sleep settings/keybindings for volume and display, etc., so I recommend i3+xfce for anyone wanting to give i3 a try without investing too much time configuring.<p>Also, i3/Sway handles external displays well, better than macOS IMO. When a display is disconnected, macOS merges the windows into the laptop display, but on tiling window managers they just stay in the same workspace number, which can be switched to on the laptop display, this is much more predictable and simpler.<p>[0]<p>I switched to Sway recently, the main reason being is that when you have an external display with a different DPI than your laptop display (which in my case is a HiDPI Retina Display), it's quite hacky to get it work under X, but it works flawlessly in Wayland. See my user config[1] for more, let me know of any questions regarding program compatibility under Wayland.<p>The configuration syntax is essentially compatible with i3 as well.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/siraben/dotfiles/blob/master/home-manager/.config/nixpkgs/home.nix" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/siraben/dotfiles/blob/master/home-manager...</a>
I used to love tiling, but now I use lots of applications that are heavy-weight and graphical, and it seems more fitting to arrange the windows in such a way that strategic corners "peek out" behind the front-most application.<p>For example, I run my IDE in full screen and the console/log is in the bottom part of the window. My browser partially covers the IDE by occupying the right 75% of the screen. Then I can follow the console/log of the IDE. Even though only the beginning of each line is visible, that's enough to tell me when it is time to switch back to the IDE.<p>If I were to make the IDE window smaller, the console/log portion of it would be too tiny to see anything.<p>If the text editor has no side bars (such as a directory tree), then it makes sense to have a full-height text editor on the left and maybe to half-height terminals on the right.<p>But then I think that maybe some IDEs allow to pop out the console/log piece into a separate window, and perhaps that could work nicely with a tiling arrangement. I haven't tried.<p>Thoughts?
I love the concept of tiling WMs, and wish mainstream WMs would adopt more of their features. But quite frankly, I just find all the tiling WMs I know just horribly ugly... (And I'm not quite sure why, but that is actually one of the biggest reasons why I don't use them anymore.)
I switched to i3 from gnome. Now I don't waste time to resize, move, close, reduce windows with the mouse. Just learn a few keyboard shortcuts to do this, that you can set as you want. Moreover I was frustated about applets in the status bar, so I did it myself and it's easy with some bash and pyton : <a href="https://en.jeffprod.com/blog/2020/create-your-own-i3-sway-status-bar/" rel="nofollow">https://en.jeffprod.com/blog/2020/create-your-own-i3-sway-st...</a>
I've been using i3 exclusively for about 5 years. I pretty much only use a single tabbed-mode window because I prefer my apps to take up the whole screen. I also use workspaces to keep things organized (browser in one, IDE in another), and guake/kitti3 to quickly bring down a terminal whenever I need it.<p>Screenshots typically show terminals and video players and IDEs all neatly arranged in tiny squares, but I've never found that type of arrangement productive.
i3 along with a few floating terminals with hotkeys is a dream setup for me. I have hotkeys for Guake, Terminator and Tilda and they position differently. I use the i3 scratchpad a lot too.<p>My current dev machine has been running ArchLinux + i3-gaps for a couple of years now. Very solid, and not a single update screwup so far.
Sadly it's bound to X11.<p>The alternative for me was to migrate to sway[1] to have a similar environment in wayland.<p>[1] - <a href="https://github.com/swaywm/sway/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/swaywm/sway/</a>
If you really dig tiling window managers but you're running on macOS, check out Amethyst.<p><a href="https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst</a>
If anyone’s looking to replicate this on OSX, check out yabai[0].<p>I have also been using skhrdc (same maintainer I believe) for key bindings and it’s an absolute blast.<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai</a>
<i>> Implement multi-monitor correctly, that is by assigning each workspace to a virtual screen. Especially make sure that attaching and detaching new monitors like video projectors works during operation and does the right thing. Also provide support for rotated monitors.</i><p>My wishlist would be to have this go further and be aware of inter-monitor, relative positioning as well. For example, I use the ⊢ layout (one rotated monitor on the left, one straight monitor right in front) and it's usually an unsatisfactory experience tiling windows for productivity.<p>Things I do on the vertically oriented monitor on the left are mostly reading documents or watching logs.
I've used i3 for years. It's an absolute love affair.<p>I used Xmonad and awesomewm before. I don't understand enough Haskell to configure Xmonad and awesomewm is a giant dependency mess (the irony being that it's a fork of dwm , the minimalist suckless wm)<p>Anyways: i3 has struck the perfect balance for me. Written in C, easy to modify, configuration is intuitive and obvious (I have no interest in spending weeks learning how to configure it), and best of all super stable and bug free.<p>Highly recommended!<p>I started using WSL2 on my windows machines just to run i3 on windows. That works too! (Basically you vnc to WSL to get i3)
For folks new to i3, some popular programs commonly used with it are:<p>- rofi: dynamic menu replacement for dmenu [though dmenu is suckless (<a href="https://suckless.org/" rel="nofollow">https://suckless.org/</a>)]
- picom: compositor
- feh or nitrogen: wallpaper management, nitrogen is gui-based
- i3-gaps: add spaces between windows, I believe it's an entire package that replaces normal i3
- i3blocks or polybar: customize the status bar<p>Hope everyone has fun with i3!
Those that love using i3/tiling managers - what does your workflow look like?<p>I used Amethyst <a href="https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst</a> an auto-tiler on the mac for quite some time but finally gave it up recently. I loved the auto-sizing but there were little niggles on the Mac e.g. some windows really needed to be floating and layout oddities when certain windows expected more width.<p>I tended to find I was mostly just using spaces to keep apps I was interested full screen and using the occasional split. I was just cmd/alt-tab'ing between apps most of the time. When I did have content in multiple windows it was then a faff to try and get the two windows I wanted in the same space. I didn't feel like I was making the most of it.<p>I've since gone back to SizeUp <a href="https://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/" rel="nofollow">https://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/</a> and manually move windows to where I want them.<p>I feel like I wasn't and perhaps I'm still not using it as effectively as I could though hence the question.
Hint for Windows users that also want to have something like that:<p>That closest you can probably get to that is with Powertoys FancyZones. Its not exactly a tiling windows manager but its close enough.<p><a href="https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/wiki/FancyZones-Overview" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/wiki/FancyZones-Overv...</a>
I'm a huge fan of i3 and sway. I recently stopped using sway because these WMs don't work well on large screens or ultrawides. They are optimized for smaller screens, especially laptop screens. I swapped to a 48" OLED and the ideal model really is to center your active window if you can. I haven't yet found a WM that handles this as well as I'd like, although PaperWM is pretty close if a little clunky due to Gnome 3.<p>The other issue w/ i3/sway is you have to spend a lot of time arranging your workspace. It gives you all the power and also all of the work. In comparison, layout based tiling WMs like bspwm, awesomeWM, and xmonad intelligently place your windows in a certain way rather than requiring the user to always decide where it goes. It's largely personal preference which you like. I think I prefer the layout based WMs but sway is the only real option for wayland as far as I know.
I have one i3 desktop per git workspace. All terminals and artifacts associated with that git workspace stay on the associated desktop.<p>The only exception are windows that need the entire screen, which get their own adjacent desktops. But for these I use the same desktop number always so it's easy to find.<p>This way I spend almost no time searching for stuff in i3. Switching between desktops is like doing a full screen grouped alt-tab. So much faster. In fact I do this even in non i3 desktop environments, but i3 makes it a lot easier.<p>However, I don't do things like email or document reading in i3, since I find that the less constrained traditional window environment is better for that.<p>The other great thing about i3 is that it's is fast over remote desktop sessions, because the ui itself is so minimal.
I have been a heavy user of i3 for the last 4 years and all in all I highly recommend it. That said - I encourage you to not jump on it just because it's the first tiling window manager that you try (like me). It turns out that a lot of what makes a tiling window manager good is how well it maps to your internal expectation of how things should be layed out. I encourage you to think about what window layout you want in each situation and figure out how much work it is to get the wm to do it.<p>In my particular case I recently switched to <a href="https://www.herbstluftwm.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.herbstluftwm.org/</a> and haven't looked back. HBWM allows me to provide more rigid control over my layouts and then tile my windows in. Since switching I have found myself spending a lot less time messing around with relative sizes and a lot more time getting work done. Just one opinion - but the point is that you should do your own research.<p>If you are interested here is my current config
<a href="https://github.com/carlsverre/config/tree/master/dotfiles/herbstluftwm" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/carlsverre/config/tree/master/dotfiles/he...</a>
Visual:
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/kcn16u/herbstluftwm_been_awhile_since_my_first_rice/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/kcn16u/herbstluft...</a><p>And here is my i3 config
<a href="https://github.com/carlsverre/config/tree/9f953365481cb96bec78c5946fd33000c802aa4f/dotfiles/i3" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/carlsverre/config/tree/9f953365481cb96bec...</a><p>If you do decide on using i3, I encourage you to check out i3-gaps which gives windows a bit of breathing room which some people fine visually pleasant. And don't forget to join the ricing community at <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn</a>
I've been an i3 user for a few years. (I discovered Ratpoison many moons ago and found the tiled approach an efficient way to use a laptop.) My configuration is nothing special, but here are a couple things I've found helpful:<p>1. Opacity follows the focus (see compton's "-i" option). If I look at a window and see my wallpaper showing through, I know that whatever I type won't be going there.<p>2. A generously sized terminal window lives in the scratchpad. Since I'm on a laptop, I sometimes find myself bouncing among workspaces fairly often--yet the same terminal is always a keystroke away.<p>Also, not i3-specific, but having a key binding for opening a specific notes file in an editor ensures that I make notes much more often.
I never really understood TWMs. They look incredibly pretty after heavy configuration, and I get the appeal of that, but for daily use my workflow - on two 27' 4k monitor - is to keep a window maximized on each and alt-tab through them when I need something else, which will replace one of the two maximized windows with its own. Occasionally I "tile" two windows side by side for comparisons etc, but that is disappearing now that one of my maximized windows is Emacs and the other is Vivaldi, both of which offer window splitting features for this use case. Does everyone using these WMs usually keep 3-4+ windows side by side on the same monitor? Don't you find it incredibly distracting?
I used i3 for about a year. Tiling wasn't for me. But what was for me where the docs.<p>The docs for i3 are great. The read well linearly as you are learning the ropes, but were also very searchable once you mostly knew what you were doing.
I used i3 for a bit, but in the end I had to ditch it because I kept getting confused.<p>I already use tmux (since everything I do is on a remote machine) and vim for panes, and even with just two I get mixed up on which system is owning the pane that I want to switch to. Adding in the third system of i3 was really nifty, but lead to a lot of broken trains of thought. Does anyone have tmux+vim+i3? Should I just try to power through this awkward period?
I use and love DWM on my home Arch system. However, at work I am stuck with Win10. Are there any recommendations for a tilting window manager for Win10? Thanks!
I somehow never warmed up to automatically tiling window managers, so I've been using notion (successor to ion3), a manual tiling / tabbing WM, for the past few years. For me this is peak productivity. I am on a MacBook Air on the go, but I wish I could get a tiling WM with focus-follows-mouse on that. Or, you know, Linux running on the MacBook Air M1 ;)
i3 is a great gateway drug into the tiling window manager world since it works well out of the box. I migrated from i3 to bspwm which is more configurable and prefer the fibonacci style partitioning. Bspwm also decouples window configuration from the hotkey daemon basically following the unix philosophy better. The ultimate trio for me is bspwm + sxhkd + polybar.
Re: <i>[Uses] a tree as data structure. This allows for more flexible layouts than the column-based approach used by other window managers.</i><p>I would say the best technique depends on the situation. Sometimes column-oriented setup is more convenient for a given task/screen, and other times a tree is better.
Been using it for more than two years at work via remote desktop but I'd still choose xmonad if I were to run one locally on a bigger display. Xmonad is really powerful in allowing you to reposition and resize multiple windows while i3 is more avaible and pain free to setup.
I really like i3 and use it as a daily driver. It was easy to learn, keeps my hands on the keyboard, and usually does what I want out of the box. Added benefit, just switch to a blank workspace and it's like you've locked your computer. Nobody knows how to use it! ;-)
Are you keeping the default configuration? What are your favourite hacks?<p>The choice for jkl; for ←↑↓→ is quite unfortunate, since it is just off by one to the “standard” hjkl. Also many keyboard layouts have some other key on the place of “;”, so they have to reconfigure anyway.
Rectangle (the spiritual successor to Spectacle) is a great MacOS window manager. Highly recommended. <a href="https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle</a>
One thing I noticed after switching from gnome (and osx) to i3 ~6 years ago is that I never felt the need for a second display since then. It's pretty satisfying to know that you're efficiently using every piece of your screen.
For the Gnome users interested in tiling, Material Shell[0] seems very promising<p>0: <a href="https://github.com/material-shell/material-shell" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/material-shell/material-shell</a>
i3 window manager was an eye opener for me. I was so surprised to see how we can control our windows just by using keyboard and this is why I love using linux and i3 was one of the major reason why I keep going back to linux
I love i3 and I have used it every day for years. Having just gotten a Mac though I have to say I miss the animations specially when changing workspaces. It's easy to get lost in i3 without them.
I have been using i3 now for many years now and like it a lot. Thank you developers! It's easy to configure and well documented, plus there are many nice extensions (like status bars).<p>With tiling window managers, for me it really is the predictability of where things are (e.g. emails are always on desktop 2 for me, browser on 1, etc.), keyboard navigation and the ability to configure all window related things in a single place / config file. Not requiring to think much about how to organize windows to quickly have a useful view lowers the cognitive load for me (possibly not a problem for others). It also allows me to quickly build pseudo-IDEs, e.g. have a left pane with vim to edit a latex file while having a split pane on the right where in the top terminal I'd call "lualatex <file>" and have the evince/zathura output of the file visible below and live-update.<p>Some random config details I use all the time:<p><pre><code> # Lock screen with Ctrl+meta x, have background image
bindsym Control+$mod+x exec i3lock -i <path/to/image>
# Show a floating calc terminal with Mod+c
for_window [instance="termite" title="My Calculator"] floating enable
bindsym $mod+c exec termite -t "My Calculator" -e calc
# Show a floating units terminal with Mod+u
for_window [instance="termite" title="My Units"] floating enable
bindsym $mod+u exec termite -t "My Units" -e units
# Allow quick back and forth (First Meta+Workspace-ID goes there, second goes back)
workspace_auto_back_and_forth yes
# Use rofi to launch programs and find windows
bindsym $mod+d exec --no-startup-id i3-dmenu-desktop --dmenu='rofi -i -show run -dmenu'
bindsym $mod+o exec --no-startup-id i3-dmenu-desktop --dmenu='rofi -i -show window'
# switch between the current and the previously focused workspace
bindsym $mod+b workspace back_and_forth
bindsym $mod+Tab workspace back_and_forth
# invert the screen with Mod+i
bindsym $mod+i exec xrandr-invert-colors
# toggle tiling / floating for window with Mod + Shift + Space
bindsym $mod+Shift+space floating toggle
# rename workspaces with Mod+t
bindsym $mod+t exec i3-input -F 'rename workspace to %s' -P ' New name: ' -f '-*-*-*-*-*-*-28-*-*-*-*-*-*-*'
# Gnome settings daemon helps us with keyrings and GTK themes
exec --no-startup-id /usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gnome-settings-daemon
# calendar with Mod+p
bindsym $mod+p workspace calendar; exec termite -e 'ikhal
# Make the currently focused window a scratchpad (a hidden floating desktop) with Mod+Shift+Minus
bindsym $mod+Shift+minus move scratchpad
# Show the first scratchpad window (on any desktop show the first floating hidden window) with Mod+Minus
# Normally there is a floating terminal with vimwiki in the scratchpad
bindsym $mod+minus scratchpad show</code></pre>
> Furthermore, core functionality does not depend on a separate program, so that i3 runs faster, especially when your system is under load.<p>Is this actually true?
I consider tiling useless. Once I set FVWM with custom geometry styles for applications, everything is just muscle memory and no terminal application get skewed or borked on an ncurses redisplay.<p>Inb4 "you waste ScrEen SpAcE", FVWM has a lovely pager and the tradition here is to not close any crap and put different work activities between pages, saving opening time. RAM issues? ZRAM handles that fine, and most of the time I don't even run X, just Tmux.
i3 is one of the reason I could never run macOS. It's so ingrained in my workflow... I even wrote custom firmware for my keyboard (built off QMK) that has keybindings specifically for use with i3.
bspwm master race checking in here. I love tiling window managers. Hands down has been the best development environment I've had the pleasure of working with.
I used to like KDE and dislike Gnome, but by the time I switched to i3 I realized I don't care about traditional window managers. I used a lot of console anyway. Why wait for windows and icons to appear? I want animations and decorations to get out of the way. If I'm playing, it's usually fullscreen. When I'm working, I want to use as much screen as possible. i3 sounded radical at first, but when was the last time an animation or decoration helped you? I mean there are some rare cases, but it needs to be helpful for me to leave it enabled.<p>I now honestly believe mouse interfaces are overrated. They have their place in games and graphical applications. Anything that does NOT require precision is better done with a keyboard. The exception is websites. Mouse is used because it has very low learning curve and you can just click on stuff that interests you without thinking how to reach it.
I've been using i3 since 2012 and I love it. I've tried several different tiling window managers over the years, but I keep coming back to i3. I love the way it works, the configuration file makes sense and it's so much better than having overlapping windows.
been using this since forever and gawd it makes me happy to use. any os i have i just install a vm and stick this on and im back to my tiling childhood.