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i3 4.18

i3wm.org

71–80 of 188 posts

Re: i3 4.18

#71
Somehow I read that host name as “I3MW” and thought it’sa site for the BMW i3 car.

Re: i3 4.18

#72
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Window management is truly a preference thing. I feel the opposite of what you state. To me, a non tiling-window manager burdens me with moving and resizing windows, mostly with my mouse. With i3, its algorithm sizes and places the window ideally 90% of the time, and I fix up the 10% of the time with key commands, never needing my mouse. My windows being so predictable and so easily maintained with the keyboard enabl…

For me the built in shortcuts to snap things to the left, right, and push to second monitor are all I really need and I get both tiling and non-tiling with windows/OS X/gnome... never understood why people go i3 when the shortcuts are built in to what you likely are already using. To each their own though, if i3 works better for y’all I think that is great too.

Yeah, it really is about preference. FWIW, i3 allows you to opt out of tiling if you really want to. For me it's alt+shift+space, and the window pops out onto its own layer, and can then be manipulated with the mouse.

Re: i3 4.18

#73
post #50

If you're looking to switch from X11 to Wayland, you should definitely check out Sway[1]. It's all the greatness of i3 rebuilt on top of a cleaner, leaner, meaner tech stack! [1]: https://swaywm.org/

>> cleaner, leaner, meaner tech stack!

What does that mean?

Sway is a great project, but I would be careful of using Wayland, as lots of minor issues came up last time I was using it ( death by a thousand papercuts ).

For example, if you rely on years of small x scripts ( xrandr, etc. ), be prepared to rewrite all of them for wayland.

Last time I used Sway/Wayland, I couldn't find a good alternative to redshift. While Gnome has it, I can't seem to just use this feature independently on other DEs.

Again, Sway is fantastic, and I fully support moving off to Wayland. But best case scenario Sway is a drop-in replacement. Most likely there will be some fiddling. Especially if you've been using i3 for years and have built a custom ecosystem around it.

Re: i3 4.18

#74
Huge shoutout to all developers of i3, I absolutely love it! Since I started using it, the connection to my machine improved vastly. The precious pixel space of my X230 finally felt utilised fully!

I never had any issues with i3. Cannot recommend it enough!

Re: i3 4.18

#75

I guess tiling window managers should be considered more of a specialized niche tool, and in that it is commendable that i3 does such a good job of it. I do really admire it for being so light-weight on resources compared to a lot of the other more popular WMs. I say a niche tool because I've never really understood why someone would prefer a Window Manager that places a lot of constraints than one that lets you cont…

I suspect a lot of the appeal is to people who prefer to keep their hands on the keyboard as much as possible. Being able to precisely position a window on the screen is possible to do without touching the mouse, but in practice doing so is very clumsy. By removing the "freedom" to precisely position windows and replacing it with a limited number of slots a window can go into, a tiling manager is more keyboard-friendly -- it's much easier to express "put this window in the upper right corner of the screen" in a few keystrokes than it is to express "put this window at these precise X and Y coordinates."

Combine that with multiple desktops, which can also be switched between with a couple of keystrokes, and you get an environment that's very easy to "drive" without taking your hands off the keyboard.

Re: i3 4.18

#76
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Window management is truly a preference thing. I feel the opposite of what you state. To me, a non tiling-window manager burdens me with moving and resizing windows, mostly with my mouse. With i3, its algorithm sizes and places the window ideally 90% of the time, and I fix up the 10% of the time with key commands, never needing my mouse. My windows being so predictable and so easily maintained with the keyboard enabl…

For me the built in shortcuts to snap things to the left, right, and push to second monitor are all I really need and I get both tiling and non-tiling with windows/OS X/gnome... never understood why people go i3 when the shortcuts are built in to what you likely are already using. To each their own though, if i3 works better for y’all I think that is great too.

The built-in snapping only works for two windows per screen though. If you want 3 or more, you're stuck with the mouse.

Re: i3 4.18

#77
For anyone here who loves i3, but has always had trouble getting full integration to work on their laptop ( sleep, screen brightness, etc. ), check out the Regolith project[0]

It's a curation of several tools combined with i3 that gives a pretty fantastic gnome/i3 experience. Similar to spacemacs and emacs.

[0] https://regolith-linux.org/

Re: i3 4.18

#78

I guess tiling window managers should be considered more of a specialized niche tool, and in that it is commendable that i3 does such a good job of it. I do really admire it for being so light-weight on resources compared to a lot of the other more popular WMs. I say a niche tool because I've never really understood why someone would prefer a Window Manager that places a lot of constraints than one that lets you cont…

I don't know about other tiling WMs, but i3 does let you stack windows. In the default config, super-s makes a vertical stack and super-t makes a tabbed stack. Most of the time it's easier to keep different windows in different workspaces though. My first five workspaces are always 1. Browser 2. Browser 3. Code 4. Messaging apps (in a vertical stack) 5. Terminals Pressing the number for the workspace where you keep t…

Stacking in that case refers to stacking in the z-direction, ie. a normal 'floating' window manager

Re: i3 4.18

#79

I guess tiling window managers should be considered more of a specialized niche tool, and in that it is commendable that i3 does such a good job of it. I do really admire it for being so light-weight on resources compared to a lot of the other more popular WMs. I say a niche tool because I've never really understood why someone would prefer a Window Manager that places a lot of constraints than one that lets you cont…

> Even Microsoft switched from a tiling WM from Windows 2.0 on wards and has stuck to it (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager ).

MS recently added snap abilities with Windows 10 that lets you split / orient 2 windows and control them with hotkeys. This isn't quite a tiled window manager but it is going out of their way to introduce a lighter form of dealing with a tiled interface.

They also released "FancyZones"[0], which is a window manager (although much different to how i3 works unfortunately). It's still in its infancy and likely has years to go before it can be compared to any popular Linux tiled window manager, but they are dedicating resources to the concept.

Until you've used a tiled window manager, it's hard to see the benefits.

[0]: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/blob/master/src/modul...

Re: i3 4.18

#80
I've always liked i3 a lot but it was a real pain to get some stuff working (like connecting a new monitor, or having to deal with wifi and bluetooth, or using two different keyboard layouts). Everything had to be configured, and while that's great for understanding how things work together, it's pretty painful when you're just trying to get stuff done.

All the pain went away when I found Regolith [0], which I heavily recommend. It's i3 with Ubuntu but it comes with sensible defaults, a nicer theme and shortcuts to all the configs you could need out of the box. It really makes things a lot easier than using just i3, especially when doing a fresh install (it's available both as an installable image and as a package - I've had no issue with either).

Some default shortcuts are different so if you've been using i3 for a while you'll have to iterate a bit over the config to get to a comfortable point, but it's the same config file. I also changed the default terminal back to gnome term, since their default one doesn't have a scrollbar, but again it's pretty easy to do and you only do it once. All in all, really made my life better.

[0] https://regolith-linux.org/

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