Comment by jarboot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jarboot | Hacker News Reader

For those of you that might be professionals or adults that don't spend much time on 4chan/reddit, you should know that i3 is pretty popular with 4chan.org/g/ or reddit's linux subreddits. It's a pretty effective path for us young nerds to get into the linux ecosystem.

Beginners might learn vim to modify their ~/.i3/config, hex values for coloring their desktop, or basic CLI commands to add functionality to their keybindings. Maybe they want to add a customized weather applet to the bar at the bottom of the screen, so they write a shell script utilizing wget. Soon enough they're learning to install Arch Linux (because everybody else on that "Show off your desktop" thread is using it), and it's not long before they're a full-blown linux fanboy. That's at least the route I took.

It's not that i3 is popular among these communities because it's the easiest, but because it looks the coolest and offers the most amount of visual customization. But after getting used to it, there's an incredible amount of depth and usability that keeps you on it. I really can't imagine a more effective window manager.

If you're looking for neat-looking i3 setups, check out reddit.com/r/unixporn/ . If you're interested in getting started with it, somebody made a great tutorial for it at youtube.com/watch?v=j1I63wGcvU4 .

Interesting. I've always used i3 because it was incredibly simple to use and configure, and because it was rock-solid.

It's interesting to hear that you can actually make it look good, as it's always looked very plain-vanilla to me. Making it do fancy things would be nice too, but I honestly don't have the time anymore.

Update: I checked out reddit.com/r/unixporn/ and was not particularly impressed. Sure, those screenshots look better than stock i3, but really nothing compared to enlightenment even as far back as the 90's.

All i3 itself has to offer are either a blocky, rectangular titlebar or no titlebar, with the windows themselves having a variable width border, with the colors of both the titlebar and border adjustable. That's about it. The rest of the screenshots just show various window/root backgrounds and transparent windows. It looks ok, but I wouldn't call it "porn".

That said, i3 is still great. Even stock i3 has been good enough for me, and like I said, I use it for reasons other than eyecandy.

I don't think i3 is attempting to cater to these kinds of enthusiasts.. even from i3wm.org "The usual elitism amongst minimal window managers: Don’t be bloated, don’t be fancy (simple borders are the most decoration we want to have). "

Oh, i see some folks have forked their own version of i3 (i.e. i3-gaps) to add additional features for modding.

I think i3 should remain true to it's initial vision (i3 is primarily targeted at advanced users and developers.)

I agree. Which is why I was surprised to hear the parent poster say: "It's not that i3 is popular among these communities because it's the easiest, but because it looks the coolest and offers the most amount of visual customization."

That's not the i3 I know.

Yeah it's not, I guess the guy uses the useless-gaps patch and maybe some other customizations, otherwise it looks really average IMO (not necessarily a bad thing).

It's hardly catering to those enthusiasts, it's just the tool that works best for it.

I never really used it for that reason, I was just pointing out something that's popular among younger linux fans on other parts of the web.

i3 is really nice, it looks good with the useless-gaps patch too. But it hardly has the most amount of visual customization, rather the contrary IMO. awesomewm, herbstluftwm, and others offer way more to tinker with. Its manual tiling and modal keybindings is what makes it nice IMO.

Recently I switched from i3 to bspwm, I really love the approach bspwm takes. Definitely the best designed window manager I've used.

What advantage does bspwm have over i3?

Command driven configuration. Everything is scriptable. It also uses a binary tree structure for managing splits, and I found out that I liked that more than the way i3 does it.

Using a binary tree to partition splits is really convenient. It gives you all the manual control of i3 but the default layout is what you want most of the time.

Also it's much more configurable and has useless gaps by default (personal preference).

Looks a lot like the tiling modes I used most often in awesomewm, which I eventually ditched for i3 because the constantly-shifting configuration files were a pain to maintain and broke an extension (shifty) that i3 more-or-less includes by default. I definitely missed the different auto-tiling algorithms in awesomewm, but I've gotten pretty used to manually tiling everything.

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