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I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

i3wm.org

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Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#131

Post by doix »

jordanbeiber wrote: post #47
bitigchi wrote: post #27

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.

For me (and most, I guess) it’s about flow! Switched to i3 on a nixos box a few months ago - never leaving the tiling vm, or nixos for that matter. I suddenly use workspaces which I never used to and I have coms in one space (mail/slack/teams), terms with vim etc in one, and web browser in a third. Never looking around for windows and draging stuff around is magical for the workflow. With fzf and a launcher & window…

Agreed! It's all about the workflows! The i3 API is really easy to hack on as well, which makes creating a specialized workflow really easy. I was working on a project that was hosted on AWS + k8s and had 3 different enviorments: dev/uat/prod. I added a tiny script in my .zshrc that would check the workspace name on startup and automatically configure kubectl and a bunch of other things to match the workspace name. So every terminal I opened in that workspace was automatically configured for that enviorment.

That was fine for one project, but I had to maintain a fair few projects so I ended up having to create groups of workspaces. I used this patch: https://gist.github.com/woodensquares/c1afc4fb56b4d9d21fa261... that lets you hide workspaces from the bar if the ended with a prefix(I used _boop because I'm a child). So then all workspaces names become :_boop apart from the active group, which is just :. If you are in group 1 and switch to group 3, 1:dev would get renamed to 11:dev_boop and 31:name_boop would get renamed to 1:name and get automatically selected.

I also have a "scratch" workspace that is always visible regardless of group, I called it "i". Since it doesn't start with a number, it doesn't get affected by the workspace groups script and is always visible. I usually just stick irc there and my music player so I can access it regardless of which group/project I am working on.

I'm still waiting for this proposal to go through: https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/3818 so that I don't need to use a custom build of i3.

I hacked it all together in one afternoon and it's been working ever since. Before this I really struggled to context switch between all the different projects I was working on/supporting. This made it much more managable and got me a bunch of praise for how quickly I can fix problems/answer questions. I can't imagine trying to do my job without this setup anymore.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#132

Post by 411111111111111 »

zamalek wrote: post #109
doctorbaum wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What distribution?

If you're asking for a recommendation: Ubuntu, Fedora or Elementary. Manjaro is good if you're okay with occasional instability (due to rolling releases). My experience has been much the same switching from Windows after the past month. The Linux desktop is better.

Please don't throw out statements like "linux is better".

It is better for you, me, and some others in this thread.

But if you make a statement like that you'll get Apple Enthusiasts to try it out just to prove you wrong.

And they will find reasons, because both osx and windows both have areas where they're superior.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#133

Post by 9HZZRfNlpR »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #126
sto_hristo wrote: post #122

Used i3 fulltime for more than a year. It's great for building extremely lightweight environments that will run on any machine. 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 stuf…

I use i3 and the productivity for coding-type tasks is great. Fiddling with my i3 config and i3bar is a favourite procrastination, and I can genuinely say it's changed the way I use my computer. But Zoom is a nightmare. It's clearly only designed to work with conventional windows. It opens new windows a lot, and each time it does that, i3 grabs the new window and puts it in whatever workspace my mouse is currently at…

You can force these zoom windows by name / class / title to always open in specific workspace if it makes your life any easier. I haven't used zoom myself so difficult to tell.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#134

Post by chrismorgan »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #126
sto_hristo wrote: post #122

Used i3 fulltime for more than a year. It's great for building extremely lightweight environments that will run on any machine. 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 stuf…

I use i3 and the productivity for coding-type tasks is great. Fiddling with my i3 config and i3bar is a favourite procrastination, and I can genuinely say it's changed the way I use my computer. But Zoom is a nightmare. It's clearly only designed to work with conventional windows. It opens new windows a lot, and each time it does that, i3 grabs the new window and puts it in whatever workspace my mouse is currently at…

A couple of possibilities for Zoom:

• You could make Zoom windows float by default in your i3 config. I seem to recall there was some app I did that with on my old laptop where I used i3.

• Judging by Windows behaviour (which may or may not be the same), it’s Zoom’s fullscreen mode that’s the real problem, most readily triggered by screen sharing. Settings → Share Screen → Window size when screen sharing lets you change it so that this doesn’t throw it into fullscreen mode. This may well improve things. (I know the fullscreen mode when sharing is awful on Windows, given that I’m doing that multiple times a day at present I’ve been meaning to write some AutoHotkey to open the desired things and lay my screen out the way I want it, rather than wasting ten or twenty seconds each time. On i3 I would have done the equivalent of this long ago.)

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#135

Post by josepmdc »

veddox wrote: post #57

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.)

They just give you the bare minimum so that you can configure it the way you want. And it's really easy to configure, at least i3 since it's the one I use. If you don't feel like configuring it yourself you can always go to r/unixporn and copy someone else's configuration.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#136

Post by SJetKaran »

stfwn wrote: post #66

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. 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…

I moved from linux to mac for work stuff. Really miss the I3 functionality; yabai fills that gap mostly but not all the way.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#137

Post by aorth »

nix23 wrote: post #40
bitigchi wrote: post #27

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.

>Tiling window managers makes you conform to their way of working. That's not true, i often just use the tab-mode. Using tiling for a long time, i go berserk having to rearrange window's with the mouse, then one is over the other...etc, it a mess!

Totally agree. I'm a 100% time tabbed Sway user. I love the simplicity, lightness, and Wayland frame-for-frame correctness of Sway, but without having to do all the tiling stuff. I prefer all windows to be maximized all the time ala GNOME Shell.

For the uninformed, use Mod-W to switch windows to tabbed mode in Sway/i3. You can also organize virtual desktops in "workspaces." I keep web/music on workspace 1, terminals and IDEs on workspace 2, and email/msteams/office on workspace 3.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#139

Post by flurdy »

SJetKaran wrote: post #136
stfwn wrote: post #66

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. 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…

I moved from linux to mac for work stuff. Really miss the I3 functionality; yabai fills that gap mostly but not all the way.

There is also Amethyst for macos https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#140

Post by flurdy »

RMPR wrote: post #74

For the Gnome users interested in tiling, Material Shell[0] seems very promising 0: https://github.com/material-shell/material-shell

Pop Shell is also great [1]. I use it with PopOS but you can use the tiling Shell with other distros, Manjaro etc.

1: https://github.com/pop-os/shell

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