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I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

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Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#291

Post by pimeys »

vmchale wrote: post #271
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…

Yup, I envy the M1 but I'm on XMonad (lol) and I really wouldn't want to go back to a non-tiling window manager.

Waiting to get an M1 with a custom motherboard, a fast GPU and Arch Linux installed. I doubt that'll happen with Apple, but I suspect in a few years we have some other ARM CPU that has integrated RAM and competes with M1.

For now, a Ryzen runs circles around M1 (at least with my workloads, C/C++/Rust compilation with needs for 64+ GB of RAM) if you're willing to use some more energy.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#292

Post by pmoriarty »

shpx wrote: post #67
theelous3 wrote: post #12

I'll never understand why every dev doesn't use tiling wms. Such a free productivity and happiness win.

I used i3 for a 4+ years, then a few months ago I got tired of the screen tearing when I scrolled in Chrome and the screen showing a frame or two of checkerboard patterns (actually it's more complicated, like black pixel fuzz around text that used to be there) any time I resized or moved a window. Now I just use the built-in Ubuntu desktop environment (tried the Wayland version but Spotify and Discord don't work). Si…

"dmenu is garbage compared to program search in modern desktop environments, it's just search for bash commands, half the results arent something you'd want to run from your desktop and it doesn't learn"

Try rofi[1]. It learns.

[1] - https://github.com/davatorium/rofi

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#293

Post by intrepidhero »

I really like i3 and use it as a daily driver. It was easy to learn, keeps my hands on the keyboard, and usually does what I want out of the box. Added benefit, just switch to a blank workspace and it's like you've locked your computer. Nobody knows how to use it! ;-)

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#294

Post by vlunkr »

Miner49er wrote: post #285
krebs_liebhaber wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Good find, it seemed highly suspicious.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#295

Post by necrotic_comp »

francis-io wrote: post #165
pimeys wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost like reading my story... I used to be all in on Apple, using their iMac G4 and later on the Intel iMacs at home, but needed a beefier machine. So when I started in a new job, instead of getting a macBook, I asked the company IT to build me a workstation (and been asking for it from the companies I worked for after that). Installed Arch Linux and i3 to it, and never looked back. Did run Linux and i3 in the macs…

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?

My only/major beefs with Arch are the frequency with which they introduce breaking changes, the fact that your system may not work if you miss a news item, and the lack of humility in the community. It works, for sure, but I always felt a bit iffy when doing a massive update after a while, and I felt like I was being dragged along with their choices instead of making my own.

I bought a beefy computer last year and installed Gentoo on it - it's obviously not for everyone, but its reputation as a hard to install distro is overstated, and if you have enough horsepower and ram, an emerge update isn't a big deal. Additionally, having the ability to tailor your builds to not include libraries you don't need AND to install the sources and debug information is huge. Mostly, though, it feels logically designed, and standard sysadmin tools allow you to do maintenance without much hassle.

I'd recommend at least looking into it to see if it fits your use case.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#296

Post by anthk »

I consider tiling useless. Once I set FVWM with custom geometry styles for applications, everything is just muscle memory and no terminal application get skewed or borked on an ncurses redisplay.

Inb4 "you waste ScrEen SpAcE", FVWM has a lovely pager and the tradition here is to not close any crap and put different work activities between pages, saving opening time. RAM issues? ZRAM handles that fine, and most of the time I don't even run X, just Tmux.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#297

Post by vmchale »

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 never used much more than a simple L/R split

I use multi-displays too (XMonad; I assume i3 has the same!).

I use more complex splits occasionally for dev work I quite like it but I guess I could use something more conventional if it were keyboard-friendly.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#298

Post by jjuel »

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 turned out to be a gateway window manager. Tried out all sorts of different tiling managers, and finally stuck on DWM.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#299

Post by vlunkr »

siraben wrote: post #221

I've used i3 for several years[0], and it's one of my favorite window managers out there. I had a couple of failed attempts on Debian/Ubuntu but NixOS made it so easy to switch to i3 and use XFCE as the desktop environment, which is great when you want to use i3 but not worry about setting sleep settings/keybindings for volume and display, etc., so I recommend i3+xfce for anyone wanting to give i3 a try without inves…

i3+xfce is an extremely underrated setup in my opinion. Unless you're going for something really lightweight, I think it's the best way to use i3.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#300

Post by pmoriarty »

emptyparadise wrote: post #15
q3k wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly Sway is bound to wayland.

Wayland has a bad case of security at the cost of usability. They've been adding protocols here and there but there are still obvious things missing. Last time I checked it wasn't even possible to create something like xdotool without relying on some nasty hacks.

"Last time I checked it wasn't even possible to create something like xdotool without relying on some nasty hacks."

Well, there's ydotool for Wayland, but unfortunately it doesn't even have half the features of xdotool, and probably won't be improving much any time soon, since its README says "Since Jun, 2019, I have little time to maintain this project".

At this rate, it'll probably take another 10 or 20 years for Wayland to catch up to all the already-existing useful features of X.

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