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Switching to the i3 window manager

vincent.bernat.ch

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Re: Switching to the i3 window manager

#51

Post by rjzzleep »

12ian34 wrote: post #21

When starting out with Arch Linux 5 years ago, choosing a desktop environment and/or window manager was one of the key decisions. i3's excellent documentation and principles[0] really sold it for me. The base config is full of sensible defaults and the learning curve for shortcuts was relatively short for me. I use it alone as my WM with picom as compositor (which is unnecessary) and no DE. I've never looked back and…

I used to use awesome like the OP. I used bspwm for a while and am now using i3 as the daily driver. Here are a few of the issues that arise when using a tiling window manager:

1. Per display xrandr settings, or xsettings

2. Statusbar losing tray icons when switching screens or reloading. Tray icons having the wrong size or not showing up at all. Part of the reason is that all tray icons used to be Xembed based. Then came appindicators with KDE having KStatusNotifierItems which may just be a Freedesktop StatusNotifierItem implementation. Polybar too frequently had this issue[0]. The only third party statusbar that properly implements this with using sni-proxy is a haskell based one which's name I forgot which is hard to use on Archlinux if you use the dynamically linked haskell packages.

My compromise right now is to use lxqt with i3, which seems to be a somewhat lightweight wrapper around xsettingsd and a lightweight session implementation.

I really prefer Awesome's tiling mechanism over i3, but i3's multiscreen just works. No weird window disappearing bugs etc.

A lot of these issues seem to have been fixed inside of Gnome directly or inside of KDE, but for some annoying reason every DE seems to have to solve these issues from scratch, which is just a standard Linux issue. I've been using linux as a DE for multiple decades now, so you'd think these issues would be fixed at a more fundamental level at some point, but no ...

[0] https://github.com/polybar/polybar/issues/2010

Re: Switching to the i3 window manager

#52

Post by dkersten »

10GBps wrote: post #29

> it can feel quite overwhelming as you need to visualize the tree in your head And that's why I don't use a tiling window manager. I prefer to use my brain for actual work, not futzing around with configuration and OS BS. I mean if it takes 3000 lines of code to make your friggin window manager work then you're doing it wrong. I happen to like overlapping windows, it's just natural and free-flowing. I don't mind was…

I came to filing window managers through musca[1] and then goomwwm[2] (Get Out Of My Way Window Manager) and then switched to i3 (and more recently, away) because both Musca and goomwwm haven’t been updated in years.

I still miss Musca and goomwwm. They didn’t require any visualisation of the hierarchy, things were just layer out next to each other without a hierarchy and just worked. It was very intuitive. Goomwwm went a step further: it’s not technically a tiling window manager at all, but rather a floating window manager (so you can have your windows overlap if you want) that happens to be usable as if it were tiling and that’s keyboard centric (but you can use mouse too if you wish). That really was the sweet spot for me and I often find annoying behaviour in i3/sway that goomwwm didn’t have (typically around movement and resizing).

I sometimes dream of updating the goomwwm codebase but I neither have the time nor the interest in learning winDow manager programming.

[1] https://github.com/enticeing/musca (original source and all documentation seems to be gone)

[2] https://github.com/seanpringle/goomwwm

Re: Switching to the i3 window manager

#53

Post by a3n »

codethief wrote: post #48
a3n wrote: post #42

I used to use Awesome. And I3 before that. My young adult son would sometimes ask to do something quick on my laptop. Hilarity ensued. Now I'm a truck driver. Bought a new laptop awhile back. Don't have time to fiddle (drive, eat, sleep) so I left the default Mint desktop. Right now I'm being unloaded at a distribution center in Alabama. They tell me it will be 5 to 6 hours until they're done. No labor on Labor Day,…

> Now I'm a truck driver. […] I actually kinda miss fiddling. What did you do before and why did you become a truck driver, if I may ask?

Originally SW dev, most recently SWQA. I rage quit my last job over a conflict with a dev manager. No one else was interested in me.

Been driving three years and change. I mostly like it. I've never had a meeting, standup or otherwise. I miss my couch, weekends and the money. But it's pretty low stress. No SO, and my son is grown.

Re: Switching to the i3 window manager

#54

Post by ancarda »

Is there any way to add a close button (or any button) through the IPC mechanism? I know you can do something like $Mod+x to close a window, but I'd honestly rather just use a button. Maybe the button can have a tooltip reminding you what close is set to

I have a feeling the i3 maintainers won't want to add a close button, however.

Re: Switching to the i3 window manager

#55

Post by j3romee »

jcelerier wrote: post #18
matheusmoreira wrote: post #16

i3 changed my life. As many workspaces as I want, any window arrangement I want, including full screen. No wasted space. Wrote my own script to add nvidia GPU information to the bar. Bound important programs like browsers and terminals to shortcuts. It's amazing, it just gets out of my way and I get frustrated whenever I have to use anything else.

I love i3 but it's really missing a way to group workspaces, I use https://github.com/infokiller/i3-workspace-groups but it's subpar, what I'd really really like is a native workspace matrix...

Not exactly the same purpose but here is a small tool I wrote to group workspaces across all monitors : https://github.com/J3rome/i3-multimonitor-workspace

TLDR: global workspace span across all monitors. Changing workspace change for all monitors (Similar to what happen in windows & macos). In my opinion, it allows for a better separation between workspaces/tasks when working with multiple monitors.

It's an MVP/alpha software. Need some optimisations but it does the job (been using it daily for over a year now).

Re: Switching to the i3 window manager

#56

Post by sjdrc »

ancarda wrote: post #54

Is there any way to add a close button (or any button) through the IPC mechanism? I know you can do something like $Mod+x to close a window, but I'd honestly rather just use a button. Maybe the button can have a tooltip reminding you what close is set to I have a feeling the i3 maintainers won't want to add a close button, however.

When you full screen some windows that have window decorators turned on (like browsers) then they show the minimise, close, maximise buttons. However, I always try to use the built in hot keys for closing a program rather than unceremoniously killing them with the close client hotkey.

Re: Switching to the i3 window manager

#57

Post by sjdrc »

I used a heavily modified build of DWM for years, but when I discovered Regolith I moved to that. There is a third party project porting it to Arch.

Echoing a few other comments here, regolith is just super convenient having sane defaults out of the box, along with all the other conveniences of having a desktop environment.

I really appreciate how well and in depth this article was, I’ll probably make a couple of changes to my setup based on it, thanks!

Re: Switching to the i3 window manager

#58

Post by urlwolf »

I'm on openbox (non tiling) and I'm extremely happy. I was on tiling wm before. You can do a lot with openbox. Now I open windows, not tabs, for browser pages. And search for window title to teleport. The spatial arrangement of 'tabs' adds a layer of mnemonics

Re: Switching to the i3 window manager

#59

Post by 12ian34 »

rjzzleep wrote: post #51
12ian34 wrote: post #21

When starting out with Arch Linux 5 years ago, choosing a desktop environment and/or window manager was one of the key decisions. i3's excellent documentation and principles[0] really sold it for me. The base config is full of sensible defaults and the learning curve for shortcuts was relatively short for me. I use it alone as my WM with picom as compositor (which is unnecessary) and no DE. I've never looked back and…

I used to use awesome like the OP. I used bspwm for a while and am now using i3 as the daily driver. Here are a few of the issues that arise when using a tiling window manager: 1. Per display xrandr settings, or xsettings 2. Statusbar losing tray icons when switching screens or reloading. Tray icons having the wrong size or not showing up at all. Part of the reason is that all tray icons used to be Xembed based. Then…

I'm interested to know about your per display xsettings requirements. One of my key WM requirements is multi-monitor support, and i3 with i3status-rs works perfectly for me. Took a little bit of reading up and config though.

I did experience some issues with statusbar losing tray icons, intermittently, which curiously disappeared perhaps about the time I switched to i3status-rs. Whenever it happened, an i3-reload was the hotfix for me. I don't really use or rely on those icons much at all - in fact I could do without them entirely.

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