i3 4.18

I initially installed because it was cool, but I stayed because I started to think in i3 keyboard commands. Being able to summon a new terminal window and have it slot into place when you have a new thought is another one of those things which remove friction similar to using the command line over a GUI.

I've noticed when going back to Mint/Cinnamon that even though the terminal is only a click/keypress away, I think about it differently because it feels heavier and slower, the window chrome makes it feel more 'desktoppy' and if I want to summon a bunch of them to do a few different things (or one thing with a few different strands) I'll need to put in some cognitive effort to rearrange them how I like them. It's a bit of an immersion breaker.

Controllable constrains. Tiling wms give you more hooks than anything else, so more control than anything else. I often have more than 4 or more workspaces in i3 and I love being able to swap between them with ease. Many users of tiling wms have specific hotkeys that grab windows or workspaces or populate workspaces with a predefined layout. Its nice to have programmatic control over the interface to your computer.

E:

> That even control freaks like Apple, who like to think only they know what's best for their consumers, doesn't use a tiling only WM in their OS is telling.

I don't think so. Like any other pro tool it has a learning curve which without a little time investment renders the tool useless. I think the only telling thing about Apple's choice of window management features is that they shoot for the lowest features possible so that users can learn them all as quickly as possible. On-boarding > user control for Apple.

I think the GUI that Apple ships is successful in so far as all of its features are literally visible. You literally have a mouse and a clickable pad, you always have maximize/minimize buttons. Any more advanced software has "hidden" features in that they hide behind menus and hotkeys. Though everything that is hard about "modern" computational interfaces is that discoverability is shit, see [1]

[1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi...

On my personal machine, I use i3wm, and on my work machine I use OSX with Spectacle (a window tiler).

For me, the killer feature of i3wm is not how it lets me arrange windows on my screen, but how it lets me switch between them. With OSX, I have to maintain a mental stack of recently-used applications: If I'm in my terminal and I want to get to firefox, I have to hit cmd-tab, or maybe cmd-tab-tab, or maybe cmd-tab-tab-tab. At least once a day, I make an off-by-one error and get stuck in a context-shift loop until I pause, think, and do the needful. With i3wm, I have 10 workspaces, and each is available with a single chord press. I have my own conventions about what's where, and there's no cognitive load associated with switching between text editor and documentation, or whatever.

Along the same lines, I like to keep a roguelike open for quick breaks, but ideally I'd never accidentally switch to a video game. OSX gives you no ability to punt an application from your cmd-tab list except to quit the application. With i3wm, I keep that on workspace 0, and have never accidentally switched over to it.

You may think I'm being precious, but it really does make a huge difference in my ability to stay in the zone.

Window management is truly a preference thing.

I feel the opposite of what you state. To me, a non tiling-window manager burdens me with moving and resizing windows, mostly with my mouse. With i3, its algorithm sizes and places the window ideally 90% of the time, and I fix up the 10% of the time with key commands, never needing my mouse.

My windows being so predictable and so easily maintained with the keyboard enables me to stay in flow much better. I basically never think about my windows, it's just a "solved problem" for me.

It's unfortunate that tiling window managers are really only available on Xorg based OSes. I feel if Windows and OSX had really good tiling window management (the available solutions are nowhere near as good as what something like i3 can do), then tiling window managers would be much more popular IMO.

I started using it a couple of weeks ago because I use three or four terminals on one screen, and I was sick of manually tiling them with the mouse. There are several 3rd party programs for MacOS that let you organize windows with just the keyboard, but I couldn't find anything for Gnome. Honestly, if I could find a program to tile terminal windows, not tmux style, but actual windows, I'd drop i3.