i3 Tiling Window Manager

Soldato
Joined
1 Nov 2007
Posts
5,610
Location
England
For the last week or so I've been stuck using my laptop which is pretty good, but it only has one screen compared to my primary computer which has three monitors, so I'm missing having all of that space available to me.

I then installed Manjaro with the i3 window manager, and I have to say it is fantastic for doing multiple tasks at once. Once you have memorised the keyboard shortcuts, it makes working with multiple windows at the same time on a 1080p screen easy. You can see everything side by side and if you want one window to be full screen for a short time, then you can press a keyboard shortcut, do what you want, and then disable the entire screen.

If you've only ever used something like Gnome or KDE, I highly recommend you check it out. Even when I go back to my three monitors set up, I'm going to be sticking to i3. It makes you so much more productive.
 
Soldato
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
3,103
I've been using this on archlinux since 2014 :D

Tiling window managers make things so much more productive.

On my main PC I have 2 monitors & have odd number workspaces on left monitor & even on the right.
I was using openbox before and had tried awesomewm & dwm before settling on i3wm.

My setup hasn't really changed much since 2014.

i3wm
conky + i3bar + json: system info cpu/gpu temps, cpu load, memory usage etc
dmenu: launching applications & scripts
tk_logout: my own tkinter shutdown menu

The main things I like about it is the key setup & setting custom application settings using for_window :)

There is also a version (i3-gaps) which allows setting gaps between windows & seems to be getting popular at the moment. (I tried it but don't really like gaps between windows)
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
1 Nov 2007
Posts
5,610
Location
England
I've been using this on archlinux since 2014 :D

Tiling window managers make things so much more productive.

On my main PC I have 2 monitors & have odd number workspaces on left monitor & even on the right.
I was using openbox before and had tried awesomewm & dwm before settling on i3wm.

My setup hasn't really changed much since 2014.

i3wm
conky + i3bar + json: system info cpu/gpu temps, cpu load, memory usage etc
dmenu: launching applications & scripts
tk_logout: my own tkinter shutdown menu

The main things I like about it is the key setup & setting custom application settings using for_window :)

There is also a version (i3-gaps) which allows setting gaps between windows & seems to be getting popular at the moment. (I tried it but don't really like gaps between windows)

Sounds like a nice setup. I'll look into the for_window stuff for web browser windows. That sounds pretty useful. Thanks for the tip.

I used to use Arch Linux but it just got too fiddly to get everything working so I switched to Manjaro which has most of the benefits of Arch Linux but has an easy to use installer which gives you a basic configuration to play around with. The default i3 config is pretty cool.
 
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