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i3 4.18

i3wm.org

151–160 of 188 posts

Re: i3 4.18

#151

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 think looking at mainstream, consumer OSes really say much of anything other than maybe W.I.M.P. paradigm has turned out to be easily teachable and scalable. Are GUIs better because more people use them instead of CLI (I'm not trying to rehash an argument--instead point out they're each better at different things)? Both Apple and Microsoft's pro apps deviate from their own OS' GUI conventions.

Like "pro" apps, every IDE I can think of has their own UI conventions, eschewing their host OS. All I see a tiling WM doing is extending that to the whole OS. Tiling WMs IMHO are great at avoiding the mouse and strapping together your own "IDE" whether that's tailing a log while looking at code next to it, or looking at a result in a browser.

Re: i3 4.18

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I haven't set it up.

Re: i3 4.18

#153
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…

> and places the window ideally 90% of the time, and I fix up the 10% of the time you can replicate whatever setup you had using i3-save-tree which outputs a json file e.g i3-save-tree > .config/i3/workspace1.json and then load that upon startup (from your i3/config): exec --no-startup-id i3-msg 'workspace $ws1; append_layout ~/.config/i3/workspace1.json' or see full config mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/i…

There's also i3-layout-manager [https://github.com/klaxalk/i3-layout-manager], which lets you do this more easily. It integrates super nicely with Rofi, too.

Re: i3 4.18

#154
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/

I switched to Sway a couple days ago and to be completely honest I'm not sure what I gained from it besides Wofi feeling more modern than Rofi. I don't regret the switch but I don't feel like it was a good choice either.

Re: i3 4.18

#155
post #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. Whil…

I found similar issues. One other showstopper for me was the lack of keyboard/mouse sharing ala synergy or barrier.

Re: i3 4.18

#156
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup, this is what I use for editing. Vifm in whatever directory I'm working it but small and floating. Mod+Spc focuses my nav, Mod+Spc to focus the underlying windows.

Have it set up to spawn vim or VSCode instances using shared buffers and it's crazy handy. I can't go back to vimsplits!

Re: i3 4.18

#157
post #127

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.

Like anything else, it depends on your workflow and preferences. For those of us in Animation/VFX, it really helps having multiple monitors as we have a decent amount of windows to manage interactive graphs, timelines, viewports, outliners, render views at full resolution, reference, etc. Pixel real estate comes at a premium here, and flipping back and forth between workspaces is not efficient in this context. For some in this area a single 4K may suffice, but dual monitors of anything is usually better (for editorial and grading it's essentially a requirement as a dedicated reference monitor, with other departments like comp able to use as well).

Re: i3 4.18

#158
As a long time dwm[1] user and the developer of a tiling script for KDE, Krohnkite[2], I'm purely curious what makes i3 so popular. It makes you spend extra brain cycles on managing windows, which isn't far from stacking WMs in my perspective. I mean, this extra cycle was the reason why I abandoned stacking WM.

Especially on small ("13 ~ "15) laptop screens, where people usually have On the other hand, I do admit manual layout can be really useful on large screens and ultra-wide ones. There's neither golden nor silver layout that always works well on large area. There are just too many possibilities, and imagination is the only limit in this case.

[1]: https://dwm.suckless.org/ [2]: https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite [3]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Comparison_of_tiling_wi...

Re: i3 4.18

#159

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…

Why do you feel the need to write such a comment? Not every piece of software is for you. If it's not something you're interested in, there's no need to write up a post about how you Just Don't Get It. If you are asking a question, do that, but there's no need to trash the idea of a tiling WM just because it doesn't suit your personal needs.

> Why do you feel the need to write such a comment?

To learn and share obviously. (In fact, thanks to some of the other's who replied to my comment and explained their views, I am considering exploring the features of virtual desktop / spaces more now to see if it suits my workflow.)

As for you looking at my comment negatively, that can't be helped on the internet - we all have different personalities and different styles of communication, and everyone of us will, at some point, earn some supporters or piss of someone with what we are saying.

It's also harder to communicate in such a medium because of the lack of non-verbal cues that otherwise would help us better understand what the other person really means.

Re: i3 4.18

#160
I used i3 about two years ago, and have been using awesome since then. Can anybody elaborate how do these two projects compare in 2020?
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