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I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

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Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#281

Post by pmoriarty »

Barrin92 wrote: post #62
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.

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 i…

"When I'm on a Windows machine I spend so much time alt tabbing and dragging and resizing"

There's at least one tiling WM for Windows (don't recall the name off-hand, but someone here probably knows).

It's also possible to run i3 itself in Windows, under Cygwin, though of course it will only manage X applications.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#282

Post by Blikkentrekker »

b0rsuk wrote: post #262

I used to like KDE and dislike Gnome, but by the time I switched to i3 I realized I don't care about traditional window managers. I used a lot of console anyway. Why wait for windows and icons to appear? I want animations and decorations to get out of the way. If I'm playing, it's usually fullscreen. When I'm working, I want to use as much screen as possible. i3 sounded radical at first, but when was the last time an…

Aren't tiling window managers the traditional ones?

The ability for one window to float over another was a later innovation and is of course more difficult to implement. The earliest versions of Windows were also tiling only, which is thus the traditional way.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#283

Post by djsumdog »

I've been using i3 since 2012 and I love it. I've tried several different tiling window managers over the years, but I keep coming back to i3. I love the way it works, the configuration file makes sense and it's so much better than having overlapping windows.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#284

Post by wing-_-nuts »

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 get 'do one thing, and do it well', but there's absolutely nothing stopping the i3 folks from putting sensible defaults in the config for controlling brightness, sound, etc. It's simply a lack of care for the user experience.

I have tried regolith, but I found it to have weird conflicts between i3 and gnome. It may be worth another look though.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#285

Post by Miner49er »

krebs_liebhaber wrote: post #214
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 dont like Microsoft operating systems and wanted to try something different. I installed Linux. The installation process was very painful. Getting it to cooperate with the hardware was worse, and of course there is no real support. I finally got it halfway working. At that point, I found it was hard to learn, harder to get used to, and hardest to do anything useful since none of the programs were familiar. Two days…

Wow, this is great copypasta. The only other place I can find this is here: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.linux/c/g0DSYFSUXAA?pli=1

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#286

Post by resoluteteeth »

abetlen wrote: post #279

My brand new laptop was stolen while I was in school and I had to finish the year with a used 10-inch netbook I borrowed from a friend. Because of the tiny display and underpowered processor I had to get creative, I installed Arch plus i3 and it worked like a charm. In fact, I noticed my productivity actually went up. Eventually I got a new laptop, I switched off Arch to Ubuntu but I've been using i3 ever since. If y…

> If you're an i3 user here are a couple cool things to check out:

> - scratchpad [1]: Little known i3 feature. Let's you put individual windows in a scratch workspace and then pull them up quickly over your regular workspaces. Really useful docs and things like that, I keep my time tracker in a scratch workspace.

Ah, this is nice. I used to use a similar feature with ion before I switched to i3 but I didn't realize that i3 had the same functionality built in.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#287

Post by scaladev »

shakezula wrote: post #270
edejong wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I browse a lot of the web using my keyboard using either Vimium or Tridactyl. Together with i3, it feels like a totally different and pleasant experience.

Agreed, between vimium, Vim, and a window manager, I almost never have to actually touch my mouse. Keeps me in the zone a lot more.

Except for all the JS-heavy crap which refuses to work properly with keyboard navigation plugins. It's obviously an excellent idea to use a styled instead of a . For example, Grafana is nearly unusable without a mouse: try configuring a chart and see how far you'll get. These interfaces must present enormous problems for users who rely on accessibility features.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#288

Post by nicolapcweek94 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #240
nicolapcweek94 wrote: post #213

I never really understood TWMs. They look incredibly pretty after heavy configuration, and I get the appeal of that, but for daily use my workflow - on two 27' 4k monitor - is to keep a window maximized on each and alt-tab through them when I need something else, which will replace one of the two maximized windows with its own. Occasionally I "tile" two windows side by side for comparisons etc, but that is disappeari…

I'm a heavy user of both i3 and emacs. I would never use emacs as a window manager, because it's simply not stable enough for me -- it crashes and hangs quite a lot, and I have to restart it from time to time when I update my configuration and want to test it out from scratch, or when emacs get confused after running it for a long time. i3, by contrast, has been 100% stable for me, and I almost never have to quit or…

This makes sense to me, looking for stability both in usage and in configuration. Emacs has been that for me, but I do use it for nearly everything for a very extensive configuration. As I understand it the idea is to look for the familiarity and consistency of using the same environment in the same way for all uses, which makes total sense if you haven't been putting stuff in your init.el for years.

Thanks for the POV!

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#289

Post by dkersten »

krebs_liebhaber wrote: post #214
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 dont like Microsoft operating systems and wanted to try something different. I installed Linux. The installation process was very painful. Getting it to cooperate with the hardware was worse, and of course there is no real support. I finally got it halfway working. At that point, I found it was hard to learn, harder to get used to, and hardest to do anything useful since none of the programs were familiar. Two days…

I’ve been running Linux on and off on a variety of hardware since the early 2000’s and it has never ever caused any hardware damage. Also, if “Linux kills hardware” do you really think the cloud providers like AWS would be running Linux on all of their hardware? The only hardware failures I’ve ever had to deal with were when running Windows.

Sounds like you have a computer repair guy who doesn’t know anything about Linux and is bullshitting you.

I also don’t understand how your installation process was painful. Installing Ubuntu or Manjaro (the two I’ve installed most recently and most frequently over the past few years) is simply a few clicks for me and everything’s done. It really wasn’t any harder than the last time I installed OSX or windows.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#290

Post by pqb »

nhumrich wrote: post #176
francis-io wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is kind of my story too. I stick with ubuntu LTS just for an added level of confidence things are compatible, but Arch might be a good idea to look into. The arch packages are a big plus. Do you find many compatibility issues?

I have found that a lot of people _think_ Ubuntu is safe/stable. But because the Linux kernel is a little behind, it usually isn't. I have had way more stability and compatibility with arch because everything is always up to date.

> I have found that a lot of people _think_ Ubuntu is safe/stable.

As a 10+ years long user of Ubuntu and its derivatives (currently Pop_OS!) I would say I know it is stable. Ubuntu still feels like a polished Debian for a typical computer user, which has many of pre-configuration made that non-techies and not-that-much-knowledgable persons will love. I don't like many decision they have made, e.g. favouring snap over apt, complete lack of a proper GUI for managing installed software/packages, sometimes missing packages that are on Debian but not on Ubuntu (though, the deb file can be downloaded and installed with a single command). After tremendous work done by GNOME users to tweak gnome-shell I have never had a freeze / hang up since three years on Ubuntu. I am also happy having recent drivers from Nvidia that works good enough to also never see any problem in 5+ year history related to GPU card. I also didn't have a problem to install drivers for my printer and scanner, which have a dedicated installer (deb file). I am just a happy user.

Calling kernel for a reason Ubuntu feels stable is wrong I think. I have tried many times Arch and I had many occasions to be not very convinced to its "stability". The most annoying issue I had on Arch was related to sound - when I was changing volume in Spotify client it was changing the system volume. Imagine the situation when you had a headphones with a volume level set at 3-4% and you have increased it by 20-50%, a nightmare for ears and hearth. After that "feature" I have completely removed Arch from my disk and I am not looking back to it nor other rolling distro.

These days I also don't see any unique selling point that Arch had in the past. It is still known for a best documentation and the most recent software. During last 2-3 years I don't remember if I had been complaining on outdated software in Ubuntu. If I would do then there are awesome projects like flatpak, xbps[0] or nix[1] that can be installed without changing my OS and they provide everything what I probably can win using Arch.

[0]: https://voidlinux.org/

[1]: https://nixos.org/

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