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I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

i3wm.org

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Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#151

Post by j7ake »

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…

Nice story thanks for sharing!

Is it easy to reconfigure keyboard shortcuts like cmd+C for Mac but ctrl+C on Linux? I have spent way too much time trying to do it on Ubuntu and it has made it hard for me to make the switch.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#153

Post by pacifika »

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…

What are you using as replacements for keyboard maestro and hazel?

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#154

Post by cdiddy2 »

byecomputer wrote: post #130
jeromenerf wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sway, the i3 clone for wayland, actually allows to use the mouse to drag and drop a window or group of windows. This is something supported in other window managers. The best of both worlds? I agree that the mouse can be great and effective. Plan9 / Acme editor is a great example. I also like the additional buttons when browsing, you know, prev/next.

I appreciate the tip. GNOME 3, which I understand had a rocky start, has been honestly the most intuitive and usable desktop I've had yet, so I can't say I'm in the market for now. But it's always fun checking new things out, so I will keep those in mind.

material shell for gnome might be fun to try out. Its very easy to switch on and off from the gnome environment

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#155

Post by ajbonkoski »

I've used i3 for years. It's an absolute love affair.

I used Xmonad and awesomewm before. I don't understand enough Haskell to configure Xmonad and awesomewm is a giant dependency mess (the irony being that it's a fork of dwm , the minimalist suckless wm)

Anyways: i3 has struck the perfect balance for me. Written in C, easy to modify, configuration is intuitive and obvious (I have no interest in spending weeks learning how to configure it), and best of all super stable and bug free.

Highly recommended!

I started using WSL2 on my windows machines just to run i3 on windows. That works too! (Basically you vnc to WSL to get i3)

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#156

Post by [deleted] »

robenkleene wrote: post #142
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…

> it is ultimately quite silly that you need to use special URL schemes and workflows to open a text file across different apps. Curious what you mean by this? Which additional mechanism does Linux (or i3?) have for opening a text file between apps?

[deleted]

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#157

Post by shrikant »

chrisweekly wrote: post #148
chrismorgan wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cha…

Thanks for the tip. I'm on macOS using Divvy. When I'm on a zoom and its fullscreen mode has been triggered, I hit esc to end fullscreen, then cmd-shift-(arrow or enter) to put it wherever I want it. With 2 monitors and a handful of easily-defined, keymapped positions, I've never felt a need for autotiling per se. (If I were to get into more sysadmin / SRE -type terminal-based work, I think I'd reach for tux in that…

TBH this is exactly what I do in KDE as well. I've set up window "quick tiling" keyboard shortcuts in the KWin config.

Existing applications just remember where they're supposed to be, while new application windows float by default, and I can snap them into a tiled position on any monitor with a few keystrokes.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#158

Post by paledot »

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…

I was actually impressed that Zoom's screen sharing works at all in i3.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#159

Post by patwolf »

I've been using i3 exclusively for about 5 years. I pretty much only use a single tabbed-mode window because I prefer my apps to take up the whole screen. I also use workspaces to keep things organized (browser in one, IDE in another), and guake/kitti3 to quickly bring down a terminal whenever I need it.

Screenshots typically show terminals and video players and IDEs all neatly arranged in tiny squares, but I've never found that type of arrangement productive.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#160

Post by stfwn »

pacifika wrote: post #153
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…

What are you using as replacements for keyboard maestro and hazel?

These are exactly the type of silly applications that are needed on macOS because the OS too locked down, or at least not made for people who like to do this type of stuff.

On Linux, almost all native applications keep their data in regular, non-proprietary files on the file system. This means your data always exists separate from the applications and you can do with it what you want. If you want to run a script every Monday at 3PM that sifts through your ~/downloads folder and uploads the top 10% largest files to a server, except in January, on Easter, when when your drive is below 70% capacity, if it's not hooked up to power, and also not if Kanye West tweeted something in all caps, you can do that. You can make it retry every 42 minutes if conditions weren't met, email Bob and message Alice in Slack about it. You can make it machine learn your behavior and pick a window within 3 hours after sunrise, log the bandwidth usage, and have it play a tune for your friend's MPD server on the other side of the country.

Why you would want to do all of this is beyond me, but odds are you want to do one of these things at some point. Then Hazel won't be able to do it because they didn't consider your use case, that functionality is only available in version 6 (pay up for the upgrade!), Apple didn't provide the right API, or they recently took it away in the name of security. Surely there's another app that can do it, but that one can't do the other thing! Oh well, maybe the next version?

On Linux, you dream up the code in the language of your choice and it will work forever. Your learned skills will transfer one-to-one to programming you do for your job or hobby, instead of being weirdly specific and locked down to this one, overpriced app's clickity click interface. The OSS mentality of interoperability and doing one thing well almost guarantees there are battle-tested tools available that can solve pieces of your specific puzzle, while not locking you in to their way of doing things.

Of course scripting is not exclusive to Linux, but it is the only OS that was and is built with it in mind.

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