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Comment by LAC-Tech | Hacker News Reader

Had a linux break due to the hardware I was using, but now have i3 as my "daily driver".

I both like and dislike tiling windows. It's nice having stuff automatically take up non-overlapping space on the screen when you spawn new apps... but this doesn't scale. Even on a 32" monitor I almost never have any more than 3 windows.

Which means I end up having way too many workspaces (aka "virtual desktops") to compensate.

I remember using openbox back in the day, I've set aside some time to try it out again - a long with a new panel (would be a serious faux pas to use i3bar with openbox).

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It can scale with the right setup, certainly better than overlapping windows. I've got a hierarchy of monitors (3) --> workspaces (10) --> windows (1 to 3 as you've described). For the terminal it goes further: tmux panes (8) --> vim panes (arbitrary number). Some of these elements in the hierarchy are named. Workspaces are fixed to a particular monitor to make finding them easy. It's been perfect for dealing with lots of applications and windows.

It's less hassle to change between more workspaces with few applications and one keybinding to select them than to switch between fewer workspaces and then alt tab or what have you between stacked applications.

It's literally the same amount of keypresses.

It's literally not. If you have 10 windows open that's up to 9 presses of alt+tab. With workspaces it's one press of whatever you have configured for the workspace, such as alt+1 (or 2 or 3, etc)

True, switching to workspace allows you to omit some keypresses since you immediately get to a smaller bucket of windows.

But then once you get the workspace you want, more keypresses are to get it in focus.

The maximum number of operations will still tend to be higher especially if you use the keyboard. You have to switch to the correct workspace, the correct monitor, and then the correct window. If the workspace has 6 apps on it you realistically probably wont want to alt tab up to 5 times.

I would if I were still using say KDE hit a hotkey on the mouse to scale out, click a workspace, then hit a hotkey to display all windows on that workspace and select the correct one. This reduces it to 2 operations which isn't horrible but it still requires one to attend to the screen in between and pick up the mouse which makes the operations both more cumbersome and slower.

It's also very natural on i3 to have a lot of one application workspaces or one with 1-2 utility windows meaning most switching operations have exactly one stop something that you COULD do on KDE but people generally don't because the shape of the UI doesn't encourage it.

I use dmenu to switch between windows

How does that work? (I use dwm and use dmenu to launch programs.)

Sorry, it's rofi, not dmenu I had the names mixed up.

Ahh,OK.

Do you use i3 all by itself, or do you add base services from a desktop environment?

In the context of a laptop, I am thinking about things like: mounting external drives, power management configuration, network configuration (access to wireless networks), switching keyboard layout (e.g., US, US international), ...

(edit) Context: I did use i3 all by itself before, but always seemed to be missing something. Afterwards I switched to KDE which I do like, but i3 is snappier and a tiling wm is handy on laptops with small screens and/or older hardware.

A window manager is only part of what's needed to get a full desktop setup. While desktop environments come with a bunch of programs preselected for you, a window manager really just manages windows. You essentially have to assemble your own desktop environment.

Afaik you can use i3 as a replacement for kwin if you want the i3 experience with a premade desktop environment.

In my case, I use i3 almost all by itself. I use some external services, mostly gnome, like:

- polkit and friends (asks for a password when attempting to run some "admin" task)

- NetworkManager applet (for Wifi / VPN)

- blueman (for Bluetooth)

- udiskie (removable media mounting, with udisks2 behind the scene)

- dunst for notifications

- Rofi for launching apps

I don't use a keyboard layout switcher, but use the US Macintosh layout with level 3 shift for my non-English writing needs (produces dead-keys, like Lvl3+E / E -> é, mapped to the Windows keys).

I don't use a power manager, either. My laptop is happy to give me the same kind of battery life as in Windows with whatever the Arch defaults are.

This is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to know. Thanks!

you have to BYO some of these utilities, udiskie for external drives, ibus for keyboard layout. Stuff like wifi should be part of your init system, for me connman runs at start up no matter the WM.

Yes, I understand, but I've searched for this before and it is hard to find a list of the utilities that people typically use with i3wm or any other barebones window manager.

IME it's a process of "oh, I wish this happened" and then you search the arch linux wiki :)

You see a lot of beautiful setups with i3 or BSPWM on /r/unixporn. I did use i3 for a solid year but... it's just not for me. I loved being able to navigate everything with the keyboard but, honestly, sometimes I just want overlapping windows (yes that's actually achievable with i3 - but it's kinda hacky)

If you haven't checked out gnome-shell already, maybe that's something for you.

For me, the workspaces are actually a plus. It makes me think about the grouping of my windows. I usually have workspace for web browsing, another for IDE with possible terminal window and long running tasks or servers on the highest available workspace number, so it doesn't get in my way.

I end up having two virtual desktops for the same thing.

I3 has tabs, but I find tabs very awkward. their names get mangled "H[V[...]]", and half the time when I rearrange windows I end up just killing and relaunching them.

Try tint2. I dislike the default settings but it’s nice once configured.

Love the look of tint2, but only having one clock is annoying.

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