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I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

i3wm.org

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Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#251

Post by wenngle »

cycomanic wrote: post #235
wenngle wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

obs is a qt app. If you start it with -platform xcb it overrides the environment variable set to use wayland and uses x instead. It works fine for me with that change.

Yes, that's what I've been doing. However, somehow screen-recording and video overlays don't seem to work (I don't use it enough to really chase down what's going on).

I use the wlrobs (https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs) plugin to do screen capture. I don't use obs much either, but it seems to work fine for my use case.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#253

Post by pmoriarty »

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.

"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."

That's just way too fiddly and time-consuming for me. 99% of the time I want my windows maximized and stacked behind each other. i3 does this for me automatically, and requires absolutely no interaction from me to have them set up the way I want.

If I was using a floating window manager for that, I'd have to manually maximize them and manually stack them.

If I want windows to be positioned in some custom layout that I use one time and never again, there is no difference between i3 and floating window managers, because i3 lets me do exactly that in the same way as floating window managers do, as I can float any window in i3 and position and resize it normally.

However, if I want to repeat a particular window layout then I can configure i3 to automatically put windows in that layout. I used to do this with GIMP a long time ago, before it had single-window mode. Now I just use it as a single maximized window, and don't bother with that.

I make popup windows float, so those will appear centered and disappear without changing my window layout, as one would expect of popup windows.

Occasionally I'll manually float a window, when I want the kind of control you're talking about, or when I want it to overlap my default maximized window for some reason, but that's pretty rare.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#254

Post by jedbrown »

gspr wrote: post #172
solarkraft wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Though would switch to sway in a heartbeat if they sorted hidpi and xwayland together Do you mean that XWayland doesn't support HiDPI yet? I'm told it's coming ... some day (in a few months). Meanwhile even Chromium got Wayland support so the last laggards on my machine are the JetBrains IDEs.

> Do you mean that XWayland doesn't support HiDPI yet? Correct. Emacs is my last regularly-in-use X program under Sway, and my god does it look horrid on a large HiDPI screen :-( > I'm told it's coming ... some day (in a few months). I remember reading that it's complicated and extremely un-sexy (because it's essential X work).

I recently switched from xmonad to sway and have been using this fork [1] of Emacs. See [2] for install instructions:

> We (@masm11 and @fejfighter) are going to push @fejfighter's fork to the fsf's repository, instead of my fork. @fejfighter's one is rebaseable and have English commit messages. See #23.

[1] https://github.com/fejfighter/emacs [2] https://github.com/masm11/emacs

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#256

Post by nickjj »

sto_hristo wrote: post #122

Used i3 fulltime for more than a year. It's great for building extremely lightweight environments that will run on any machine. The productivity side of it is slightly exaggerated (in terms of tiling vs stacking manager), and i didn't find myself saving so much time. One thing i've always missed from the stacking manager is the window overlap - i do that quite often, especially when reading something while doing stuf…

> One thing i've always missed from the stacking manager is the window overlap - i do that quite often

You could probably float those windows to solve this problem right?

I do agree about overlap being useful. In some cases overlapping ends up being one of the most efficient ways to use a few tools together to create an optimized workflow.

I made a video about this recently around taking advantage of "always on top"[0]. It's not an example of using a tiled window manager, but it does show how overlapping windows on another window lets you comfortably use a few programs together in a nice way. All operating systems have tools to get this behavior.

[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/always-on-top-lets-you-pin-a-...

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#257

Post by kache_ »

cmauniada wrote: post #16

If anyone’s looking to replicate this on OSX, check out yabai[0]. I have also been using skhrdc (same maintainer I believe) for key bindings and it’s an absolute blast. [0]: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

I used i3wm for years at a previous job, and my new job's policy is Mac OS only (everyone has a price). I use yabai as a replacement but it really is a hack. It works great, and I much prefer it over the suboptimal window management shortcuts/techniques that macos provides. However, it is much slower than i3wm, which is a lot more native than yabai which is a scripting layer over window management.

I really wish MacOS would just open up.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#258

Post by adkadskhj »

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…

I completely agree about "spacial memory" - i use my non-i3 WM in the same way.. but i'm not a fan of tiling in most cases. Does i3 still have tools i might find useful?

To further illustrate: I primarily have an open Terminal+Tmux for editing on my main monitor. On my side, i have spacial but overlapping windows. They stick out a bit, such that it's primarily four tabs - left,up,right,down. For example my Slack is on the left tab, and i can always see my contact list, people typing to me, etc. My Browser is usually on the Up tab, as it allows me to see the browsers tabs themselves. I do the same with Zoom on the bottom, such that my Mic (mute/unmute) is always visible. And etc.

This arrangement perhaps isn't ideal, but it's better than a tile for me because in a tile, i lose so much real-estate that the window becomes near useless. I can't shrink Slack to 1/4 of my Monitor, it's got too many boarders/etc. Same goes for my Browser, most sites have non-collapsing sidebars and etc, a tiny 1/4 window is useless.

This method of spacial layout obscures ~90% of my windows but leaves some of it always visible. In some cases that's very useful. But this is something i manage through the day, and a WM to automate this positioning would be amazing.

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#259

Post by vngzs »

I love i3, but I dislike manually positioning windows. I much prefer dwm[0], which will do window arrangements for you. The tagging features are also much more robust than virtual desktops ("mail folders" vs "gmail tags" is a perfect analogy - you can assign multiple tags to a window, and display any arbitrary combination of tags on the screen at a time).

That said, in spite of my alignments with dwm's ui principles, for the last five years I've almost exclusively used i3. Unlike dwm, I don't have to modify C code in order to configure my window manager, and I don't have to pull in patches that haven't been upstreamed[1] in order to include basic features.

I think there's room for a window manager with the ease of configurability found in i3, but the dynamic tiling (i3 is _static tiling_, which means the wm will not assist you in positioning windows) and tagging features of dwm. I would move to it in a heartbeat.

[0]: https://dwm.suckless.org/ [1]: https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/

Re: I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

#260

Post by birriel »

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 i3!

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