Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

i3wm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 454 posts

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#241

Post by peatmoss »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #197

I used i3 for a while when unity had a really annoying multi-touch bug I could not work around. The thing is? I never used much more than a simple L/R split that was available in any OS / WM forever. If I wanted to split more, it was usually in the terminal, and done via tmux or the term app. Add to this, a full desktop environment will handle all sorts of things for you like brightness, volume controls, proper locki…

Yeah, there’s a core of “just enough” desktop support that I wish I could get with i3 and Sway that I didn’t have to painstakingly do myself.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#242

Post by Ar-Curunir »

nemo136 wrote: post #216
toxik wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i3 aside, the continuation to your story for me is, use Linux machine, be decently productive but nothing works quite the way it should. Change your keyboard layout to one of your own? Eh maybe Xmodmaps, oh but then it gets reset every so often because $HISTORICAL_ARTIFACT. You have to change the actual xkb mapping, which is very much not a “happy path” in any DE. The only graphical e-mail client that actually seems…

For the keyboard layout, use a mechanical keyboard program it through qmk, loose 1 month adapting to it, and voila, problem solved.

Lol this is sarcasm, right?

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#243

Post by siraben »

MarcScott wrote: post #183

I'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 anyth…

Ooh, another NixOS user! I'm curious about your setup;

Do you use the same NixOS configuration across machines?

Do you use i3 with another desktop environment or by itself?

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#244

Post by cycomanic »

toxik wrote: post #166
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…

i3 aside, the continuation to your story for me is, use Linux machine, be decently productive but nothing works quite the way it should. Change your keyboard layout to one of your own? Eh maybe Xmodmaps, oh but then it gets reset every so often because $HISTORICAL_ARTIFACT. You have to change the actual xkb mapping, which is very much not a “happy path” in any DE. The only graphical e-mail client that actually seems…

Not sure what you're trying to do in keyboard layouts. I've yet to encounter the flexibility for keyboard layouts that you have in linux in any other OS.

Regarding email clients, again I'm not sure what you consider feature complete, but even some of the proprietary options like mailspring or hiri exist on linux.

For calendar it again depends on what you are trying to do. I've recently started using Minetime, which is not OSS but free and is working very well for me.

One of the weird phenomena that I find in these discussions, is that people are often happy for proprietary software (like OSX or windows) to restrict what they are able to do, and having to adjust their workflow to these systems, but when it comes to OSS suddenly not being able to match the previous workflow, makes the system unsuitable. (Note that this is not aimed at you directly, just a general observation).

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#245

Post by pmoriarty »

noodlesUK wrote: post #8

I love i3 (though would switch to sway in a heartbeat if they sorted hidpi and xwayland together). Its only major flaw in my mind is that you will never be able to use someone else’s computer without feeling a seething frustration that it isn’t running i3 with your config...

"you will never be able to use someone else’s computer without feeling a seething frustration that it isn’t running i3 with your config."

How often do you actually use other people's computers?

I virtually never do, and in the rare cases that I do I'm ssh'ing in to them from my own computer which is running i3, so it's not an issue.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#246

Post by siraben »

kule wrote: post #218

Those that love using i3/tiling managers - what does your workflow look like? I used Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst an auto-tiler on the mac for quite some time but finally gave it up recently. I loved the auto-sizing but there were little niggles on the Mac e.g. some windows really needed to be floating and layout oddities when certain windows expected more width. I tended to find I was mostly just using…

i3 has a great feature I use all the time--tabs. I don't use a lot of workspaces since that leads me to context-switch too much, but when I want everything visible on a single workspace, I use tabs. You can also select the parent group and move them around workspaces or displays as a single unit.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#247

Post by peatmoss »

hiq wrote: post #211
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #197

I used i3 for a while when unity had a really annoying multi-touch bug I could not work around. The thing is? I never used much more than a simple L/R split that was available in any OS / WM forever. If I wanted to split more, it was usually in the terminal, and done via tmux or the term app. Add to this, a full desktop environment will handle all sorts of things for you like brightness, volume controls, proper locki…

The easy answer to your second point and some integrated experience is the unix philosophy of 'do one thing but do it right'. I was also frustrated at the beginning, but I dealt with it and now I have i3 mappings to do most of what I used to do through GUIs. I can also do much more through scripting because I know which commands to use to handle clipboard, screens, etc. If you use your computer once a week to check y…

I just wrote in another comment that I wish I had a little more desktop in my i3/sway, and this looks to be the ticket.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#248

Post by profsnuggles »

dotancohen wrote: post #175
profsnuggles wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be talking about auto-tilers like xmonad. Those are the devil (joking, sorta). My favorite tiling window managers in order of preference would probably be exwm (emacs wm) -> stumpwm -> ratpoison -> i3. These are manual tiling wms. So in exwm I can chose how to position and resize my windows any way I want. For example I can hit C-x 3 to split my screen in half vertically then C-x 2 to split one of the vertica…

But KDE allows all this _and_ allows windows to overlap. There are keyboard shortcuts for "take the left half of the screen" and "move focus to the window left of this one". How many windows does a typical i3 user have open anyway? For tiling terminal apps, I just use the tiling feature of KDE's Konsole, and used to use Terminator.

"How many windows does a typical i3 user have open anyway?"

I have no idea I, just told you I use emacs as my window manager. Pretty sure that I don't come even close to any definition of typical.

A few things though. Every window manager I listed can do floating windows if you want. (Maybe not ratpoison) In my opinion overlapping windows is an anti-feature but it's possible for people with differing opinions.

It's a matter of workflow I suppose. I want tiling first. When I open a new program I want it to open in my currently focused tile every time. If I have a window in another tile, or not visible, I want to hit a couple keys and bring it into my focused tile. Not have to faff around switch to make a different window active and then re-tile it.

So sure you can use a floating wm as a tiling wm, sorta. And you can use a tiling wm as a floating wm, kinda. Pick the method you are going to use the most start there and then maybe throw in a little floating/tiling if you like.

I just wanted to point out about manual tiling managers. It seems like when tiling wms come up people say they tried xmonad or awesome and didn't like it. I absolutely hate auto-tiling managers but I like other tiling window managers.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#249

Post by diablerouge »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #197

I used i3 for a while when unity had a really annoying multi-touch bug I could not work around. The thing is? I never used much more than a simple L/R split that was available in any OS / WM forever. If I wanted to split more, it was usually in the terminal, and done via tmux or the term app. Add to this, a full desktop environment will handle all sorts of things for you like brightness, volume controls, proper locki…

I use a tiling window manager configured to work alongside XFCE, which provides many of those things you listed, with maybe the exception of hot plugging an external display and the keybindings for volume/brightness. It means I get a preconfigured panel, a set of small GUI utilities designed to work together, and also the ease/comfort of the window management scheme that I prefer.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#250

Post by jtxx »

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…

Wild, this is the path I went down and it was just 3 months ago! I didn’t expect Fedora to become my daily driver so quickly.
Post reply on HN