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I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

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Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#331

Post by pqb »

pimeys wrote: post #313
pqb wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> What I don't miss from Ubuntu are the PPA's,

I have just looked into the extra sources to see if I have any PPA there but I was surprised to see the only one, which come with a Pop_OS! to bring some custom tiling manager and other tweaks.

Frankly, era of PPAs has ended. I don't find many software packages shared on Launchpad nor I won't trust PPA owners to install anything from most of PPAs. There are better ways to share software and easier to set own APT server. Today, almost all software distributors I know (Microsoft, Slack, Sublime, Spotify, Hashicorp...) have their APT repository on also their server or on a packagecloud[0] / JFrog Artifcatory[1]

> If you plan to do any gaming in Linux.

To be honest, I find KVM with GPU pass-though a better idea overall (I can use software like Affinity Designer thanks to that). KVM is a really top-notch software if you know to configure it properly :) However, proton and wine can be installed without any problem on Ubuntu.

> 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.

I have a complete range of various programming tools and SDKs that hardly can be packed in 240GB disk. My current setup is rather small: Jetbrains IDEs, Unity3D, Qt Creator/Designer, emacs with orgmode, vim, various chat apps, Spotify, Syncthing, Sublime Text & Merge, rofi, pass, fossil, nginx, flutter, nimrod, nodejs, deno, zsh, golang, chicken-scheme, milena+ivona, orca, backup tools, terraform with terragrunt, multipass and some dotfiles and private scripts. It takes about 3h to complete format disk and install OS and provision all software I need (thanks to terraform). My DE is GNOME with a taskbar (Dash To Panel extension) instead of a dock. Is it minimal? Likely no, but it does its job.

[0]: https://packagecloud.io/

[1]: https://jfrog.com/artifactory/

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#332

Post by jessemillar »

Steltek wrote: post #327
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'm jealous of you and others in this thread that shared this path. I've unfortunately been dragged in the other direction: I was a happy i3/Linux user and now I'm coping with a multi-monitor Mac setup which stubbornly refuses to support workflows which I find to be very fast and efficient. There are some tools (all $$) for Mac which attempt to replicate a tiling WM but Apple's support for it is extremely poor, affec…

I'm no longer using a Mac (for employer reasons), but I had a lot of success with Yabai (free/open-source) before I switched. https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#333

Post by city41 »

Steltek wrote: post #327
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'm jealous of you and others in this thread that shared this path. I've unfortunately been dragged in the other direction: I was a happy i3/Linux user and now I'm coping with a multi-monitor Mac setup which stubbornly refuses to support workflows which I find to be very fast and efficient. There are some tools (all $$) for Mac which attempt to replicate a tiling WM but Apple's support for it is extremely poor, affec…

This is the danger of tiling window managers :( I now fear one day I will work at a company that won't let me use Linux.

But on the flip side, it's a great testament to the power of tiling. You'll have to claw i3 out of my cold dead hands :)

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#334

Post by zhengyi13 »

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…

Your complaint about the xkb/xmodmap/whatever situation is dead on, so my solution has been to simply go with a programmable keyboard. Don't have to remap capslock -> ctrl anymore - no matter what distro I use, capslock is always ctrl, right from the get-go.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#335

Post by robenkleene »

yoz-y wrote: post #317
Out_of_Characte wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Got it yeah, this is probably why I was confused. URL schemes are the only way to do a lot of things on iOS, whereas (as far as I know) they're additive to the *nix ways of doing things on the Mac.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#336

Post by wincent »

j7ake wrote: post #151
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…

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.

I'm trying to work through this lately and finding it hard: findings so far — https://wincent.com/wiki/Modifier_keys

Biggest hurdle is finding a clean way to do application-specific overrides, because even if you can get the general case working right, there is a lot of per-app variation.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#337

Post by shakezula »

scaladev wrote: post #287
shakezula wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh for sure, I get insanely annoyed when I run across sites that have unnecessarily complicated JS for stuff as mundane as buttons, but cutting 90% of my mouse usage still makes my computer use a lot better.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#338

Post by Steltek »

jessemillar wrote: post #332
Steltek wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm jealous of you and others in this thread that shared this path. I've unfortunately been dragged in the other direction: I was a happy i3/Linux user and now I'm coping with a multi-monitor Mac setup which stubbornly refuses to support workflows which I find to be very fast and efficient. There are some tools (all $$) for Mac which attempt to replicate a tiling WM but Apple's support for it is extremely poor, affec…

I'm no longer using a Mac (for employer reasons), but I had a lot of success with Yabai (free/open-source) before I switched. https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

I haven't disabled SIP yet. As a Mac novice, I'm wary of breaking something required for work (and in a pandemic WFH to boot) that I can't fix. But it looks like it's optional.

I'll give it a shot! Thanks for the tip!

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#339

Post by pkulak »

pimeys wrote: post #304
necrotic_comp wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

It has been much better for the past 5+ years, but what I did with my workstation is I installed Arch into a btrfs file system. Now when I `pacman` whatever, it'll create a snapshot first and then run the updates. If anything breaks, I go to the grub menu, boot into the previous snapshot and rollback into that state. Never needed it yet, but it's good to have. I remember the problems in the past... You can also do it…

I do exactly the same thing. Snapper is amazing. I've used it once, but only because it was a bit more convenient than downgrading the one app that got messed up.

I also used it recently when I tried to get the new Assassin's Creed to run. I knew it was a bit of a crap shoot, so I took a snapshot before I started compiling and installing the Git versions of graphics and translations libraries. After a couple hours I realized it wasn't going to work and just rolled my root directory back to before I started throwing packages all over my system. It was very satisfying. :D

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#340

Post by hiq »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #284
hiq wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure what kind of defaults you would like to see. For instance I have this in my i3 config:

bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec --no-startup-id amixer sset 'Master' 2%+ bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume exec --no-startup-id amixer sset 'Master' 2%-

but there's no guarantee that this would work everywhere depending on what's installed, I just know that it works in my case. It's easy enough to look up anyway ('linux change volume from terminal'), so users would just save 5 minutes if the default worked for them. I think the message is that i3 is not targeting the same people as Gnome, and it's fine. Different software for different needs and trade-offs.

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