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I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

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Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#351

Post by devenblake »

pkulak wrote: post #342
eeskildsen wrote: post #91

One of my favorite things about i3 is that it doesn't force itself on you when it's not needed. You can keep it "in the background" in tabbed mode, effectively using it like a non-tiling WM, as long as you want. Just let your windows pile up and switch between them with fuzzy search (rofi/Switcheroo). Then, once usage patterns emerge, you can tile to take advantage of spatial memory. Example: - Start i3 in tabbed mod…

This is why I can never switch off i3 (well, Sway). I just use tabs too much. I even hacked Firefox to hide the tab bar and open every "tab" in a new window so I could use Sway tabs for browsing. BSPWM/DWM/etc all look cool, but no built-in tabs.

How did you hack Firefox that way? Been trying to figure that out for a while, no luck.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#352

Post by onlydnaq »

MarcScott wrote: post #315
siraben wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, p…

> There’s probably a way to get those last three into my NixOS config

There is, it’s called home-manager [1] and it’s a pretty nice way to manage your config files and user packages even if you’re not on a NixOS system.

[1]. https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#353

Post by birriel »

orthecreedence wrote: post #347
birriel wrote: post #260

For folks new to i3, some popular programs commonly used with it are: - rofi: dynamic menu replacement for dmenu [though dmenu is suckless ( https://suckless.org/ )] - picom: compositor - feh or nitrogen: wallpaper management, nitrogen is gui-based - i3-gaps: add spaces between windows, I believe it's an entire package that replaces normal i3 - i3blocks or polybar: customize the status bar Hope everyone has fun with…

Want to add one: just started setting up i3 again after about an 8 year break from it, and found i3status-rs to be very pretty and functional: https://github.com/greshake/i3status-rust

This looks really neat, love the powerline look.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#354

Post by pimeys »

pqb wrote: post #331
pimeys wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

It's all good! Happy that we have many open source distros to choose from. I've used Linux since 1995, and have always a soft spot for Debian based distros. For some weird reason though, Arch has been my main driver for some years and right now, I see the distribution to be not an issue anymore. I see no reason to change, and what I have just works fine for my main tasks.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#355

Post by cycomanic »

pmoriarty wrote: post #266
3np wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think it comes down to personal preferences a lot. I've been tiling-only (save for a couple of secondary things) for over a decade and it's by far the most productive to me. Always having 100% screen used, no windows overlapping (apart from things like file dialogs, alerts and my "quake console"), and never having to touch the mouse for navigating/repositioning is great. It works great both on a single laptop, a…

"The only time it doesn't fit great is with e.g. GIMP that has several small windows for toolboxes and stuff" You could try running GIMP in single-window mode (via GIMP's menu option: Windows -> Single-Window Mode ). It doesn't get rid of every little window GIMP has, as it'll still pop up windows for saving files, for example, but it's much better than multi-window mode, if you don't want to bother with lots of litt…

Thanks so much! Didn't know that there was now a single window mode.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#356

Post by dugmartin »

jsilence wrote: post #206

For those wanting to try this without building a sane config from scratch regolith might be a nice option. Very easy install on Ubuntii, well thought out and built-in cheat sheet. https://regolith-linux.org/

I've been using regolith for a year or so now on both my work laptop (Dell XPS 13) and personal dev box (System 76 Meerkat) hooked to the same 44" TV monitor.

Overall it has been a good experience. Once you get muscle memory for the shortcuts to move between windows and workspaces, resize and toggle fullscreen windows you can start really flying. The built-in cheatsheet mentioned by the parent poster helps to get there.

Bonus: when I'm sharing my desktop with a work colleague (they all use Macs) I often get asked how I'm doing what I'm doing so fast.

I do sometimes still get a little frustrated when I want to reorder windows in a workspace. It can be done but feels a bit like solving a Rubik's Cube. It would be nice to be able to do things like:

1. Rotate the windows (either direction) that touch all the screen edges and then inherit the window size that the window moves into.

2. Be able to flip window sets that touch the side edges, eg swap all the windows on the left with the right.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#357

Post by mraza007 »

i3 window manager was an eye opener for me. I was so surprised to see how we can control our windows just by using keyboard and this is why I love using linux and i3 was one of the major reason why I keep going back to linux

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#358

Post by bjakubski »

gradstudent wrote: post #81
tazeg95 wrote: post #61

I switched to i3 from gnome. Now I don't waste time to resize, move, close, reduce windows with the mouse. Just learn a few keyboard shortcuts to do this, that you can set as you want. Moreover I was frustated about applets in the status bar, so I did it myself and it's easy with some bash and pyton : https://en.jeffprod.com/blog/2020/create-your-own-i3-sway-st...

Do your keyboard media keys work? One of the biggest gripes I had with i3 is things like volume, brightness, mute and so on. It's possible to configure everything to work again of course, but very painful. Other system related things that exist in gnome (wifi, bluetooth, sound, microphone) are also a pain to do without. Again, lots of tinkering needed to get things working anew.

Just wanted to touch on media keys. I've recently discovered playerctl and that media players expose standard dbus interface for playerctl to use. In (bare) i3 I bind XF86AudioPlay to "exec playerctl play-pause" (etc.) and it seems to "just work", with spotify client, youtube, youtube music (both in firefox)

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#359

Post by kellyjprice »

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…

If you're at all interested in tiling window managers, I can't recommend regolith enough. It's built on top a minimal ubuntu install and gnome-settings-daemon, so it gives you most of the non-window manager desktop stuff you would expect. At first, the distro was all the same stuff I would uninstall/install to roll my own environment. But they keep working on it and expanding the docs.

The only difficult part for me, is that they change the i3 config defaults. So often, instead of checking the i3 docs, I have to read my local config first.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#360

Post by jchw »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #73
jchw wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are forgetting that you actually can sandbox and contain apps. Under X11, doing that and then giving the app access to the display is dangerous. Under Wayland it is not. This matters for Flatpak, Snap, firejail, etc. I have seen multiple such arguments that you can “sandbox” X11 access, with no proof or really bad compromises; I don’t believe it.

> You are forgetting that you actually can sandbox and contain apps. Under X11, doing that and then giving the app access to the display is dangerous. Under Wayland it is not. This matters for Flatpak, Snap, firejail, etc. I addressed this in my very post and forgot no such thing. Firejail can and does sandbox X11 . > I have seen multiple such arguments that you can “sandbox” X11 access, with no proof or really bad c…

What Firejail supports is nested X servers, which are complicated and often buggy. Last I checked Firejail itself only recommended using X11 sandboxing when dealing with hostile situations.

I consider having to use a nested X server, even one capable of forwarding, a huge compromise based on my experience with it.

Anyway, that did not exist before Wayland was even conceived. First of all, hardware acceleration in Xpra has been a relatively rocky story for a long time. Second of all, Firejail didn’t support using it until 2016.

If you want to keep buying borderline Linux-incompatible video cards and running an unmaintained display server, by all means try to jam a security model onto an inherently insecure client-server system to help justify it. As cold as it may be, the world will happily leave you behind. And if you don’t believe me, just keep waiting. Lots of people thought Macromedia Flash would stick around forever, too.

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