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i3 4.18

i3wm.org

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Re: i3 4.18

#141

Post by zwayhowder »

mbreedlove wrote: post #25
mherrmann wrote: post #21

I've been using i3 for a few months and can never see myself going back to working without it now. I must say that I think it makes most sense when you have multiple monitors though.

I used i3 for a while and really enjoyed it. Though, I eventually switched back to KDE. I didn't like having to fiddle with power management and configuring screen locking. I was noticing that I was only using 1-2 tiles at a time and I could easily emulate that by just side-by-siding windows in KDE. I think if I ever have the chance to use a Linux machine professionally, especially with multiple monitors, I'll defini…

I found i3 the most useful at two extremes, my 12.5" (1080p) Thinkpad screen and my 43" 4K screen. Both benefit immensely from the tiling and virtual desktop arrangement and especially on the smaller screen the scratchpad.

Yes setup is fiddly at first but on my daily driver I haven't touched the config file in months.

Re: i3 4.18

#142

Post by ubercow13 »

jolmg wrote: post #136
ubercow13 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You have to somehow indicate to the system what it is you want to type on You do it by moving the mouse. It makes the mouse more useful because you can now focus things with one less click. On the other hand, in what circumstance would you want to move your hand to the mouse, move it intentionally over another window without clicking, and _not_ focus it? What would be the point in moving the cursor?

> in what circumstance Precisely in the one that brought this into topic. It's nice to not have to be so careful with how the mouse moves. When it gets in the way, I can just flick it off, not worried about my stuff changing focus. It also greatly decreases the annoyance of accidentally touching a touchpad while typing.

Fair enough, that makes sense. In practice I don't ever find I make mistakes with the mouse and focusing, but then I am very good with the mouse (after playing those FPS games :)

Re: i3 4.18

#143

Post by fanf2 »

dpbriggs wrote: post #138
webmobdev wrote: post #30

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…

Definitely a preference thing, but how many windows do you actually have open? At home and work I configure four virtual desktops: firefox, emacs, terminal, misc. I usually have spotify open or more rarely a file manager in misc. I can then bounce around in an absolute way (don't need to remember alt-tab or cycle history) using +{1,2,3,4}.

I have 50 xterms open, and about 10 emacs frames. I have 40 virtual desktops mapped to super+ for most of the keyboard (1-0-z-/) and I roughly map tasks to desktops by spacial memory.

Re: i3 4.18

#144

Post by lostmsu »

webmobdev wrote: post #30

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…

Shameless plug: try https://losttech.software/stack.html

The setting to always tile is entirely optional: you can move windows around with mouse/keyboard as much as you want, or snap it in.

Re: i3 4.18

#145

Post by mbreedlove »

city41 wrote: post #27
mbreedlove wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used i3 for a while and really enjoyed it. Though, I eventually switched back to KDE. I didn't like having to fiddle with power management and configuring screen locking. I was noticing that I was only using 1-2 tiles at a time and I could easily emulate that by just side-by-siding windows in KDE. I think if I ever have the chance to use a Linux machine professionally, especially with multiple monitors, I'll defini…

i3 couples with desktop environments rather nicely. I've used it with KDE and MATE, and others have used it successfully with XFCE. My success with it with KDE was a little mixed, but I also didn't make any effort to resolve the little issues. With MATE though, it works flawlessly with no downsides or really any config needed. It's fantastic. Here is how I set it up with MATE: https://www.mattgreer.org/articles/mate-…

This looks really cool, thanks for sharing!

Re: i3 4.18

#146

Post by Naac »

ravar wrote: post #135
aunetx wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, if you can post it, it will be greatly appreciated! I honestly find it hard to configure i3, especially for brightness...

one hacky way to configure it is too install xfce4-power-manager and then run it in your config file. then the power manager will also handle the brightness keys.

What about sleep, display management when pluging in another monitor? etc.

Re: i3 4.18

#147

Post by Sir_Omnomnom »

butterthebuddha wrote: post #19
truncate wrote: post #14

i3 ruined my life. It's an absolute delight to use, particularly when programming. However, its hard to get Linux laptops at work (Mac or Windows), and I constantly miss i3. Also, among all tiling window managers, I think its config is probably the most intuitive to mingle with. Hardly ever breaks (if ever) between upgrades, and default workflow is very intuitive and explicit. Other window managers (eg. Awesome, xmon…

If you're on Mac, I can't recommend the yabai [1]/skhd [2] combo enough! I haven't used i3, so I don't know if yabai mirrors the i3 experience, but it's a very nice programmable keyboard-centric tiling wm for macOS. [1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai [2] https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd/

How did you setup your menu bar? I can't find something that can replicate the i3bar/polybar experience, and I don't like having the native mac menu bar as it is hard to see the desktop I currently am on.

Re: i3 4.18

#148

Post by trenchgun »

reciprocornous wrote: post #109
Naac wrote: post #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/

If you are looking for a distro with i3 preinstalled, Manjaro i3 edition is another option. https://manjaro.org/download/#i3

I can recommend that.

Re: i3 4.18

#149

Post by dpbriggs »

fanf2 wrote: post #143
dpbriggs wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely a preference thing, but how many windows do you actually have open? At home and work I configure four virtual desktops: firefox, emacs, terminal, misc. I usually have spotify open or more rarely a file manager in misc. I can then bounce around in an absolute way (don't need to remember alt-tab or cycle history) using +{1,2,3,4}.

I have 50 xterms open, and about 10 emacs frames. I have 40 virtual desktops mapped to super+ for most of the keyboard (1-0-z-/) and I roughly map tasks to desktops by spacial memory.

I'm kind of disappointed that you haven't subdivided each xterm window with tmux panes.

Do only casuals comment on HN now?

Re: i3 4.18

#150

Post by SomeGuy789 »

blux wrote: post #127
happimess wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that i3wm is amazing for single-monitor development; it lets me switch workspaces as quickly as flicking my eyes over to another monitor.

Agree, I do not understand the need for more than one monitor as your eyes can only focus on one monitor at the same time anyway. It looks cool to have a bunch of monitors in front of you and of course eyes notice stuff going on in your peripheral vision as well but for that one could use some notifier daemon to get the same effect.

At least one use case is typing something in one workspace while looking at another. Incredibly useful when you need to edit config files or edit specific portions of text. Since you only need the parts of where you're "copying" from typing it out is usually much faster.
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