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I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

i3wm.org

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Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#201

Post by napsterbr »

hibbelig wrote: post #189

I used to love tiling, but now I use lots of applications that are heavy-weight and graphical, and it seems more fitting to arrange the windows in such a way that strategic corners "peek out" behind the front-most application. For example, I run my IDE in full screen and the console/log is in the bottom part of the window. My browser partially covers the IDE by occupying the right 75% of the screen. Then I can follow…

> Thoughts?

Looks like a side monitor will work wonders for you.

I have a setup with 3 monitors:

My main 4k monitor is used for coding only. I can have 5 open buffers, side by side, with close to 120 lines being displayed in each one of them.

I have a side monitor open with a terminal which shows me the logs of the running application, plus I can easily type any additional command there.

On the other monitor I have the browser open, usually with the documentation or stack overflow tab.

When I'm doing web development I have one monitor for the web app and another one for devtools.

It's amazing. No more fighting with screen space. I highly recommend it.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#202

Post by arghwhat »

jeromenerf wrote: post #115
arghwhat wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I either need a window positioned for active usage, or don't need the window visible at all. A tiling WM not only enforces this (although it can switch to floating if needed), it handles positioning automatically so I don't need to fidget with positioning and sizing of multiple windows. It also minimizes useless fluff to make it easy to have even more windows operated in parallel. Windows, macOS, GNOME and others do…

> I don't understand people that work with small floating windows. I don’t know for the floating part, I guess it is a personal thing. But for the many small windows shown at the same time, it’s pretty useful when exploring and comparing texts, data, code, logs...

The floating part was critical, as it was about having unused screen space.

Tiling many windows (some being small) is what tiling is about.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#203

Post by fluffy87 »

dotancohen wrote: post #175
profsnuggles wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be talking about auto-tilers like xmonad. Those are the devil (joking, sorta). My favorite tiling window managers in order of preference would probably be exwm (emacs wm) -> stumpwm -> ratpoison -> i3. These are manual tiling wms. So in exwm I can chose how to position and resize my windows any way I want. For example I can hit C-x 3 to split my screen in half vertically then C-x 2 to split one of the vertica…

But KDE allows all this _and_ allows windows to overlap. There are keyboard shortcuts for "take the left half of the screen" and "move focus to the window left of this one". How many windows does a typical i3 user have open anyway? For tiling terminal apps, I just use the tiling feature of KDE's Konsole, and used to use Terminator.

i3 and sway also allow windows to overlap, which is a very useful thing to do (eg for pop up boxes, pop up menus, etc.).

It’s just not the default.

If I want to work on N windows at a time, i3 handles their tiling semi-automatically. All windows that I’m not currently using are pushed into different workspaces.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#204

Post by dahfizz »

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…

For a while, KDE supported using i3 as the window manager. So you got the whole "plasma desktop" for things like volume controls and locking, etc but then you get i3 for managing windows. That's the beauty of software with a focused scope.

I haven't tried to set it up in a while, I'm sure you could get the same setup running with sway under wayland with some effort.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#205

Post by wing-_-nuts »

__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.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#207

Post by toddnni »

new23d wrote: post #21

> Implement multi-monitor correctly, that is by assigning each workspace to a virtual screen. Especially make sure that attaching and detaching new monitors like video projectors works during operation and does the right thing. Also provide support for rotated monitors. My wishlist would be to have this go further and be aware of inter-monitor, relative positioning as well. For example, I use the ⊢ layout (one rotate…

i3 is great and it's almost a must for my productivity nowadays.

However, I would highlight, that it's ability to work in multi-monitor is huge selling point.

You would like to show something from an another screen, plug the cable, press suitable hotkey, and the workspace, that you were just working on, jumps to the new display. No need to move windows.

You go back to your desk and plug in the laptop. The workspaces will automatically jump to the monitors, per your config.

Next, you run to a meeting, the very same workspaces collapse back to laptop's monitor automatically.

There was no need to touch windows in any of these scenarios, And no more "I forgot the browser windows to the attached display" that has happened with some other systems.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#208

Post by Out_of_Characte »

robenkleene wrote: post #142
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…

> it is ultimately quite silly that you need to use special URL schemes and workflows to open a text file across different apps. Curious what you mean by this? Which additional mechanism does Linux (or i3?) have for opening a text file between apps?

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)

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#209

Post by amadeuspagel »

veddox wrote: post #57

I love the concept of tiling WMs, and wish mainstream WMs would adopt more of their features. But quite frankly, I just find all the tiling WMs I know just horribly ugly... (And I'm not quite sure why, but that is actually one of the biggest reasons why I don't use them anymore.)

You'll get used to it. It's like black coffee.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#210

Post by armoredkitten »

I've been using i3 for about six months or so now, and the biggest thing I've realized is that Alt+Tab as a way to switch between windows is such a frustrating approach to window management. Once you have more than two windows I need to switch between, I am constantly losing track of which one is next in the queue.

i3 (and other tiling managers) let you more easily navigate between windows by using their location. I can switch to the window to the left, or to the right, or use i3's tabbed interface to navigate windows similar to a browser, or switch between workspaces. But the point is, the windows are always in the same order, in the same location (unless I move them), so I find it so much easier to quickly switch between them.

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