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I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

i3wm.org

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Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#311

Post by Geminidog »

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…

Try https://github.com/gTile/gTile

or

https://regolith-linux.org/

regolith works only under ubuntu though but both should work under gnome.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#312

Post by rishav_sharan »

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…

This reads like a copy pasta...

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#313

Post by pimeys »

pqb wrote: post #290
nhumrich wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ove…

For me, why I like Arch is its package system and how easy it is to have the most recent libraries and tools for gaming.

I also like Ubuntu and I've used NixOS in the past. What I don't miss from Ubuntu are the PPA's, AUR is much much much nicer. If you plan to do any gaming in Linux, Arch is in the end much more convenient due to AUR.

And, I'm biased a bit because my installation is always quite minimal. I only have i3 and my tools for programming, and whatever is needed to run proton games.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#314

Post by asveikau »

anthk wrote: post #296

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…

I have a setup where I use a tiling wm on a laptop, and a non tiling WM on a desktop. So the screen space issue gets addressed when I have a smaller sceeen.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#315

Post by MarcScott »

siraben wrote: post #243
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?

Same configuration across different machines (apart from hardware.nix). I have a configuration.nix, networking.nix and packages.nix that pretty much covers everything. Then there's my .emacs, bashrc and my i3/config files. There's probably a way to get those last three into my NixOS config, but I haven't really investigated that.

I only use i3. Haven't found a reason to install another WM yet. I tend to use xrandr, pavucontrol and wpa_supplicant quite happily for most of the stuff people use a GUI WM for.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#316

Post by bitigchi »

mrweasel wrote: post #39
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.

I feel the same way. There are projects like EvilWM, which is still rather nice, that has the 1px border and looks alot like a tiling window manager. As I get old, I started to look more toward simple Windows managers, like OpenBox. I really do like having the buttons, and a window border I can actually hit with my pointer. Personally I think it would be fun if someone cloned Windows 3.11 and added a few ekstra keybo…

I'll try NsCDE[1] at some point. What I'm really waiting for is prismWM[2], I don't think I'll ever look back after this (on Linux).

[1]: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/jvnzkb/prismwm_in...

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#317

Post by yoz-y »

Out_of_Characte wrote: post #208
robenkleene wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

There is no additional mechanism, You just open text files as many times as you want with any program. (Unless I misunderstand the parent comments)

I think the confusion comes from the fact that the sentence mentions both macOS and iOS, whereas url schemes are an iOS-only concept.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#318

Post by b0rsuk »

Geminidog wrote: post #306
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…

>Mouse is used because it has very low learning curve and you can just click on stuff that interests you without thinking how to reach it. I have this idea for a tiling manager called rubik's cube. Basically to switch windows all you gotta use your brain and solve a rubik's cube. You also have to memorize a bunch of short cut keys for rotating the cube. Specifically avoided allowing you to use arrow keys or the mouse…

Of course this is satire. For your information, there is a tiling WM which is more radical than my preference. It's called 'ratpoison' and it literally doesn't have mouse support, by design. I don't use it because I think having mouse support is useful as a fallback, when the application can't be effectively worked with otherwise. It is for real, it's written in C was developed 2000-2017. Got any arrows left in your quiver?

I speak a language which is often considered harder to learn than Chinese. It uses latin characters but has a great deal more accumulated grammar complexity. (Spoken) Chinese doesn't scare me. Not saying this to boast - my point is that people from my country find almost all other languages easy after what they went through in school. Perspective matters.

Things change. i3 continues being popular. People will refine the idea and make it more accessible. If that catches on, you'll see more and more apps written with keyboard control in mind, initially for Linux. Other operating systems copied features from Linux in the past, like user accounts or central repositories. Web interfaces will continue to change too. Today the elderly struggle with the web, because it's so inconsistent.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#319

Post by pqb »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #282
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.

> The ability for one window to float over another was a later innovation and is of course more difficult to implement.

I find it funny, because I would say I have seen more floating window manager, when I was browsing GitHub, so I assume it is also quite easy to create a new one from scratch. Such floating VMs usually have 200-1000 LOC and die after 1 month after initial commit. Recently, xwm has been on HN [0] and it is small in terms of SLOC. There is smaller one called tinywm[1]. When we would compare them to i3[2] and sway, we can see they have thousand times larger codebase but they also bring a lot more features.

I keep my fingers crossed for more sophisticated WMs like PaperWM[3], which is "tiled scrollable window manager" to take off. They might synthesize ideas from floating and tiling managers and provide a better tool to manage windows on a screen.

[0]: https://github.com/mcpcpc/xwm

[1]: https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm

[2]: https://github.com/i3/i3

[3]: https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#320

Post by kazisvet6 »

Are you keeping the default configuration? What are your favourite hacks?

The choice for jkl; for ←↑↓→ is quite unfortunate, since it is just off by one to the “standard” hjkl. Also many keyboard layouts have some other key on the place of “;”, so they have to reconfigure anyway.

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