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 : https://en.jeffprod.com/blog/2020/create-your-own-i3-sway-st...
I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
61–70 of 454 posts
Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
#62Probably 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.
because I think having a lot of overlapping windows is hard to work with once you're used to fully utilize keyboard navigation and easily accessible workspaces.
When I'm on a Windows machine I spend so much time alt tabbing and dragging and resizing, I didn't notice it until I started using i3 on my linux machine. Five workspaces, bound to Alt 1-5, fully using the screenspace, I can almost not stand working without it any more.
Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
#63I'll never understand why every dev doesn't use tiling wms. Such a free productivity and happiness win.
I used to use a tiling wm but now that everything supports dragging windows into a side of the screen to make them take up half the screen, I find that my main usecase of tiling wm's: side-by-side windows, is handled well enough that I don't want to put up with the occasional annoyances. The main pain point of stock ubuntu gnome for me right now is that when I open too many windows, my alt-tab becomes too cluttered,…
You might be interested by this Gnome extension http://gfxmonk.net/shellshape/
Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
#64Probably 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 either need a window positioned for active usage, or don't need the window visible at all.
A tiling WM not only enforces this (although it can switch to floating if needed), it handles positioning automatically so I don't need to fidget with positioning and sizing of multiple windows. It also minimizes useless fluff to make it easy to have even more windows operated in parallel.
Windows, macOS, GNOME and others do various degrees of tiling as a sign of the usefulness. Even fullscreen is just a special case of tiling with 1 window.
If you're a kind of person that always fullscreen things, you'll enjoy a tiling WM.
(I don't understand people that work with small floating windows. It's a waste of limited screen real estate, and means you don't get to see as much of what you're working on as you could. Suboptimal.)
Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
#65I 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.)
How do you manage to see them? They are supposed to be mostly invisible. A thin border around windows? A status bar, eventually... and that s it.
Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
#66I 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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks, i3!
Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
#67I'll never understand why every dev doesn't use tiling wms. Such a free productivity and happiness win.
I used i3 for a 4+ years, then a few months ago I got tired of the screen tearing when I scrolled in Chrome and the screen showing a frame or two of checkerboard patterns (actually it's more complicated, like black pixel fuzz around text that used to be there) any time I resized or moved a window. Now I just use the built-in Ubuntu desktop environment (tried the Wayland version but Spotify and Discord don't work). Since most of the time I just have a terminal, Chrome or Emacs in full screen it doesn't even matter.
Starting compton (which seems essential for i3 but the documentation doesn't mention it) didn't help. Enabling some Intel drivers fixed the screen tearing but broke my multimonitor setup.
Also dmenu is garbage compared to program search in modern desktop environments, it's just search for bash commands, half the results arent something you'd want to run from your desktop and it doesn't learn.
It makes sense that it's not popular, most people have better things to do than read a manual and learn a new configuration language with 100s of options just to move windows around.
Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
#68I 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.)
Ugly? What do you mean with that? Sway on openSuse is quiet nice composed.
Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
#69I 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.)
Just apply any theme you want with https://www.gnome-look.org/ or https://www.xfce-look.org/ or https://www.box-look.org/
Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
#70Probably 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.
Have you tried static tiling window managers? For some reason
those are much less popular even though I find them more
pratical.
Where dynamic WMs constantly rearrange all the windows with every change according to some fixed layout, the static ones work basically like Vim's windows and buffers. Meaning windows are stacked above each other by default with only the first one showing, but with some shortcuts you can split horizontally or vertically and change all split dimensions.
I have used many tiling window managers and over time I gravitated away from all the dynamic WMs because they're just not flexible enough for the real world. They tend to work on the assumption that the user needs all windows on the screen all the time, and this does not make sense in many scenarios.