I somehow never warmed up to automatically tiling window managers, so I've been using notion (successor to ion3), a manual tiling / tabbing WM, for the past few years. For me this is peak productivity. I am on a MacBook Air on the go, but I wish I could get a tiling WM with focus-follows-mouse on that. Or, you know, Linux running on the MacBook Air M1 ;)
I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
181–190 of 454 posts
Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
#182I'll never understand why every dev doesn't use tiling wms. Such a free productivity and happiness win.
Because it doesn't really boost my productivity. I try to keep the number of windows opened to the minimum: Having more than 4 windows opened is counterproductive (at least for me) since it implies 4 different context I must switch between. I can handle 4 different windows opened easily without any tiling wms. The windows I have opened are: - the terminal (at most 4 tabs as well... but here my terminal allows me to e…
> I can handle 4 different windows opened easily without any tiling wms
But you're still using a desktop environment to open these windows? Which requires many more dependencies and breaks more often IME than a twm, while being a huge solution to the simple problem of 'open 4 x windows' in your case. One of the things I like about twm's is the massive reduction in dependencies on my machine since switching actually
Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
#183I've been on I3 with nixOS (and emacs as my go to editor) for a few years now, and it's a dream. I can carry my configurations between machines with almost no setup. Every computer I use is the same.
I find Windows and macOS painful to use. Constantly hunting around for applications I have open, that requires me to remove my fingers from my keyboard and play around with my mouse. I barely bother to use tabs for anything (terminal or browser), just switch to another workspace and pop up another instance of FireFox or a terminal.
TWM do ruin you though. Once you're comfortable in them, you'll never want to go back and so using somebody else's computer just feels alien.
Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
#184See also https://swaywm.org which seeks to implement i3 for wayland > Sway is a tiling Wayland compositor and a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager for X11. It works with your existing i3 configuration and supports most of i3's features, plus a few extras.
I second sway! I have switched full-time from i3 sometime last year and haven't looked back. In my experience it's even more performant than i3 wayland has largely been a boon, except some odd programs that don't work even under x wayland (currently that's obs and meet.jit.si and zoom screen sharing)
The only thing one needs to do is configure environment variables to start qt and gtk apps in wayland mode.
Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
#185I 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.
In macOS it is not entirely clear to me what category of things the cmd key is for. On one hand it's used for keyboard shortcuts related to window management and the system, but on the other hand it's also used to issue commands to the application itself.
In i3 you assign a $mod key, which then always and exclusively used for 'system and window management'. Opening, closing, moving and resizing windows, switching workspaces and showing toolbars is all done with some key combination that starts with $mod.
Since reading and writing the clipboard is done by the application, in my brain it should not involve $mod. So I use ctrl+c and ctrl+v for all applications. The one exception is the terminal, in which ctrl+c terminates programs. So there I use ctrl+shift+c. I also unified the register vim yanks to with the system clipboard, so for me most copying and pasting that happens in the terminal is done via `y` (yank) and `p` (paste).
A more straight answer to your question is: yes, you can remap everything to bits. You can modify what keypress each keycode should trigger, so there is really no limit to what you can do there.
Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cha…
Can also just use Zoom web client.
But my guess is if you are in the position where you can use something like i3 for your daily driver, you are in the position to use something better than Zoom.
Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
#187Sadly it's bound to X11. The alternative for me was to migrate to sway[1] to have a similar environment in wayland. [1] - https://github.com/swaywm/sway/
I boot straight into the console and then have a setup where I either run startx or start_sway. I love i3 and it was my first experience with tiling WM years ago. It is absolutely a radical break for me from all other WM's since tiling allows me to work in deep focus many desktops, 1 desktop per activity/task and my focus always on one thing not many. Also wanting not to miss out on the future I moved to sway in para…
> I boot straight into the console and then have a setup where I either run startx or start_sway
Interesting, I do the same thing but just use startx. I find it hard to find convincing reasons to move from X apart from it 'being dead,' which isn't very convincing to me. What benefits to you get from sway in your setup? Is it compatible with things like ssh X forwarding?
Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
#188Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
#189I used to love tiling, but now I use lots of applications that are heavy-weight and graphical, and it seems more fitting to arrange the windows in such a way that strategic corners "peek out" behind the front-most application.
For example, I run my IDE in full screen and the console/log is in the bottom part of the window. My browser partially covers the IDE by occupying the right 75% of the screen. Then I can follow the console/log of the IDE. Even though only the beginning of each line is visible, that's enough to tell me when it is time to switch back to the IDE.
If I were to make the IDE window smaller, the console/log portion of it would be too tiny to see anything.
If the text editor has no side bars (such as a directory tree), then it makes sense to have a full-height text editor on the left and maybe to half-height terminals on the right.
But then I think that maybe some IDEs allow to pop out the console/log piece into a separate window, and perhaps that could work nicely with a tiling arrangement. I haven't tried.
Thoughts?
Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager
#190I 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…
FWIW iOS allows apps to to permanently have access to a file or folder in another app's sandbox, they just have to get permission for it.