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I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

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Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#421

Post by nvarsj »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #205
__s wrote: post #177

See also https://swaywm.org which seeks to implement i3 for wayland > Sway is a tiling Wayland compositor and a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager for X11. It works with your existing i3 configuration and supports most of i3's features, plus a few extras.

The only thing I have against sway isn't actually a knock against it or wayland, but nvidia's drivers not supporting it. I simply can't leave my fancy gpu's power untapped, simply to use wayland.

We just need some enterprising person to add EGLStreams support for wlroots (this actually used to exist in old sway versions). I'm not sure they would accept such a PR though. It's pretty irritating though that nvidia doesn't work with the general purpose APIs.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#422

Post by nvarsj »

I'm a huge fan of i3 and sway. I recently stopped using sway because these WMs don't work well on large screens or ultrawides. They are optimized for smaller screens, especially laptop screens. I swapped to a 48" OLED and the ideal model really is to center your active window if you can. I haven't yet found a WM that handles this as well as I'd like, although PaperWM is pretty close if a little clunky due to Gnome 3.

The other issue w/ i3/sway is you have to spend a lot of time arranging your workspace. It gives you all the power and also all of the work. In comparison, layout based tiling WMs like bspwm, awesomeWM, and xmonad intelligently place your windows in a certain way rather than requiring the user to always decide where it goes. It's largely personal preference which you like. I think I prefer the layout based WMs but sway is the only real option for wayland as far as I know.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#423

Post by Hammershaft »

satysin wrote: post #349
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 am still on macOS but I totally agree with your post. macOS and iOS are seriously locked down and it can be very frustrating. Like you I used Magnet but wanting to get something more tiling window manager-like I switched to Amethyst[1] which while not as powerful is pretty good for what it is. Sadly macOS has frustratingly laggy window resizing for a lot of things. Finder and Safari are usually fine but pretty much…

yeah, I agree that macos seems to have the worst window management, both in design and implementation (particularily performance).

i3 sounds like a dream window manager to me, but in the meantime while I use Mac OS (& Windows), I've been using yabai, which is heavily inspired by i3 but limited by Mac OS.

https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#424

Post by reportgunner »

city41 wrote: post #407
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MATE with i3 as its window manager is excellent. No compromises, neither gets in the other's way. I wrote how to set it up here: https://www.mattgreer.org/articles/mate-and-i3/

This. I just install debian with MATE, install i3 on top, clone i3 config file from my git repo and all setup is done. Sound works, brightness works, external displays work.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#425

Post by __s »

nvarsj wrote: post #421
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I have against sway isn't actually a knock against it or wayland, but nvidia's drivers not supporting it. I simply can't leave my fancy gpu's power untapped, simply to use wayland.

We just need some enterprising person to add EGLStreams support for wlroots (this actually used to exist in old sway versions). I'm not sure they would accept such a PR though. It's pretty irritating though that nvidia doesn't work with the general purpose APIs.

https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#426

Post by reportgunner »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #186
chrismorgan wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of possibilities for Zoom: • You could make Zoom windows float by default in your i3 config. I seem to recall there was some app I did that with on my old laptop where I used i3. • Judging by Windows behaviour (which may or may not be the same), it’s Zoom’s fullscreen mode that’s the real problem, most readily triggered by screen sharing. Settings → Share Screen → Window size when screen sharing lets you cha…

Can also just use Zoom web client. But my guess is if you are in the position where you can use something like i3 for your daily driver, you are in the position to use something better than Zoom.

I was also astonished that someone who uses i3 would use a fat client for Zoom. I use all video conference tools(Whereby, WebEx, Teams, BlueJeans) in the browser and I haven't had a problem with i3. Video conference tool gets its own workspace and it's done.

My i3 is also set to open new windows in the workspace that triggered the new window so I never have to go fishing for any occasional pop-up, it's where it belongs.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#427

Post by slightwinder »

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.

> Aren't tiling window managers the traditional ones?

No, why should they? Traditional mainly means what is established custom, not just what comes first or later. Floating Window Managment is around for decades, since the earliest generations of GUIs and everyone is using them today by default. Tilling back in the early days was a neccesarity, not a choice, and it was replaced fast, making it the loser of development. Later development made it a viable alternative to floating, but at this point floating was already dominating.

> The ability for one window to float over another was a later innovation

Kinda questionable. It seems MacOS had floating from the beginning. Windows was missing it in the first version, but added it in the second. But nur sure how widley used Windows was used at that time.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#428

Post by Shared404 »

necrotic_comp wrote: post #295
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?

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…

If you don't have the specs to handle Gentoo and all of it's emerge's, you may like Void as well.

I've been using it a bit at work recently, and am probably going to move a personal machine or two over to it soon.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#429

Post by slightwinder »

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.

> Tiling window managers makes you conform to their way of working.

The User is defining the way a tilling manager works, so all you do is conforming to your own way, but with a more efficient tool.

Manual window managment is not worth the timewaste in most usecases. And for the rare cases where it's still neccessary the better WMs still allow manual settings.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#430

Post by tuananh »

Steltek wrote: post #338
jessemillar wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

yabai works without SIP, minus some features that requires it
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