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Switching to the i3 window manager

vincent.bernat.ch

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Re: Switching to the i3 window manager

#71

Post by codethief »

a3n wrote: post #53
codethief wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Wow, that's quite a career change! Thanks for the insight!

Personally, the one thing that saved me from going crazy during the pandemic were precisely those standup meetings (via Zoom) – otherwise I probably wouldn't have had any human interaction for months. But I suppose it all depends on who your colleagues are.

Re: Switching to the i3 window manager

#72

Post by satysin »

knazarov wrote: post #49
satysin wrote: post #32

Tiling window managers are great and they are the biggest overall UX difference I miss when using macOS and Windows vs Linux. I've tried many things for both macOS and Windows to get that "i3wm feel" but nothing quite scratches the itch. macOS can get close but sadly requires disabling security features in macOS for deep integration and that is something I don't care to entertain personally. So I make do with macOS's…

You may want to try out the yabai window manager for OS X. It’s the closest thing to i3 I can think of.

I have used yabai but unfortunately you need to disable SIP so it can inject the Dock.app process with some custom functionality. I forge the specifics but last I checked that had not changed so it was a no go for me.

Re: Switching to the i3 window manager

#73

Post by VortexDream »

Awesomewm is and always has been my favorite window manager. My biggest issue with it, i3 and other barebones WMs is that there are a lot of edge cases covered by traditional DEs that you suddenly have to solve yourself. And often they're things you first discover when you're trying to do a thing affected by that edge case and you waste a lot of time doing something other than what you actually wanted to do.

So I've begrudgingly moved back to KDE. It's customizable and capable and is close enough to what I expect a DE to be without wasting my time too much.

Re: Switching to the i3 window manager

#74

Post by lavabiopsy »

saladuh wrote: post #15
dijit wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. You’re right. I wonder why I thought it was written in rust. How terrible of me not to check before saying that.

Not to come off like an ass, but honestly when I read 'rust' I laughed. If you knew how the founders of Sway feel about rust + the difficulties people have had with creating rust wayland compositors (particularly with wlroots), the idea of Sway being quoted as written in rust is almost satirical

I'm not sure what difficulty you mean aside from way cooler, please check out smithay/anvil if you want to see decent progress on a rust wayland implementation: https://github.com/Smithay/smithay

Wlroots is a bit of an extreme case as the API is mostly idiomatic to low-level C and not easy to wrap in safe rust, I believe the developers are also not keen on supporting C++ either. This is intentional design choice on their part, as "language-binding-friendly" C APIs usually tend to expose some kind of reference counting or smart pointers that make it easy to adapt to a higher level language.

Re: Switching to the i3 window manager

#75

Post by Eldt »

codethief wrote: post #71
a3n wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow, that's quite a career change! Thanks for the insight! Personally, the one thing that saved me from going crazy during the pandemic were precisely those standup meetings (via Zoom) – otherwise I probably wouldn't have had any human interaction for months. But I suppose it all depends on who your colleagues are.

You don't have family or friends to talk to?

Re: Switching to the i3 window manager

#76

Post by sndwnm »

Pius_IX wrote: post #34
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…

First of all, you are absolutely right. Using your brain for actual work and not futzing around with configuration is always a great choice. But honestly, the amount of mental energy the author seems to put into this is way beyond anything I would consider needed to use a tiling window manager. Just the base configuration with an application launcher installed is pretty much enough for most people. And I have never i…

This. The author is obsessed, but that makes it fun to read. I've been using i3 exclusively for close to a decade and never used a window placement other than 1-3 windows in a horizontal row; switching to tabbed layout when I want something fullscreen; and rarely, for specific applications, a floating layout. Rather, I use a lot of workspaces (16) and put windows in those that I expect to find them.

My point is, you don't need to use a WM/DE like others are using it, but how you prefer to use it. i3 is flexible enough to allow many styles, so choosing to use it might be mostly about whether you think it can cover your preferences.

Re: Switching to the i3 window manager

#77

Post by Karrot_Kream »

1_player wrote: post #45
remedan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encourage you to browse /r/unixporn [0]. I my opinion, a nicely configured tiling wm can look just as good as a stacking wm. And people on the subreddit are happy to share configs, so you don't have to spend more effort than some copying and pasting. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/

Those /r/unixporn screenshots are as real as a McDonald's burger in an ad. In both cases it's mostly careful staging to make it appear better than it is in real life (or when you're actually using your computer).

> Those /r/unixporn screenshots are as real as a McDonald's burger in an ad.

Haha this is a great line! I'm gonna use this on my friends :D

Re: Switching to the i3 window manager

#78

Post by ssivark »

cassepipe wrote: post #40
gbuk2013 wrote: post #30

For my new job I had to switch to Ubuntu on my corporate laptop and I installed Regolith ( https://regolith-linux.org/ ) on it which is basically i3 on top of Gnome (was using Awesome WM on Debian before) and so far it is a very pleasant experience 9 month in.

Does Regolith offer an out-of-the-box i3 experience or do you have to tweak it the same ?

Regolith is literally just i3 (plus Gnome) with sane defaults. FWIW, it's also slowly getting decoupled from the underlying Ubuntu infrastructure. Eg, here's regolith for Arch linux: https://github.com/gardotd426/regolith-de

Re: Switching to the i3 window manager

#80

Post by saladuh »

lavabiopsy wrote: post #74
saladuh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to come off like an ass, but honestly when I read 'rust' I laughed. If you knew how the founders of Sway feel about rust + the difficulties people have had with creating rust wayland compositors (particularly with wlroots), the idea of Sway being quoted as written in rust is almost satirical

I'm not sure what difficulty you mean aside from way cooler, please check out smithay/anvil if you want to see decent progress on a rust wayland implementation: https://github.com/Smithay/smithay Wlroots is a bit of an extreme case as the API is mostly idiomatic to low-level C and not easy to wrap in safe rust, I believe the developers are also not keen on supporting C++ either. This is intentional design choice on t…

I should have said just with wlroots. Though smithay isn't a full compositor. There's a BSPWM issue on github (I can't be assed finding it rn) about Wayland where the authors of waycooler explained their difficulties in creating a rust wayland window manager after someone suggested that the wayland version of BSPWM should be written in rust. The waycooler devs generalised their statement to the wayland protocol in general, but in hindsight what they were likely referring to was just their struggles in wlroots.
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