i3-WM / i3-Gaps

[Termy]

I've been an exclusive i3-wm user for around 7-8 years, so I figured I would start a thread to let people know it exists. It's a great lightweight, keyboard-focused tiling window manager with straightforward configuration syntax, lots of cool features, and excellent documentation. It's especially ideal if you're familiar with or looking to learn more about the terminal. It's also well documented.

If anyone's curious, here's a screenshot of my minimalistic i3-wm setup:

If you have any questions, thoughts, or just wanna share i3-wm tips, have at it.

[Hoser Rob]

I do like such things (I like Xfce and LXDE) but if I was going to use IceWM or similar I'd just install Antix.

[deanr72]

I've been an exclusive i3-wm user for around 7-8 years, so I figured I would start a thread to let people know it exists. It's a great lightweight, keyboard-focused tiling window manager with straightforward configuration syntax, lots of cool features, and excellent documentation. It's especially ideal if you're familiar with or looking to learn more about the terminal. It's also well documented.

If anyone's curious, here's a screenshot of my minimalistic i3-wm setup:


output.jpg


If you have any questions, thoughts, or just wanna share i3-wm tips, have at it.

I switched to i3wm fully a few months ago and am loving it. I started with awesomewm and spent about 6 months setting it up as I wanted it. Then I thought I'd give i3wm a go and had it fully configured in about 3 days! It's so simple to use and the tiling + stack/tabbed layout works perfectly with my workflow.

My current set up is running on MX Linux Xfce with the xfwm replaced by i3gaps. I'm wondering whether it would be possible to do the same on Mint's Debian. Thoughts? Is i3 and i3 gaps in the Mint repos, anyone?

[cliffcoggin]

How on earth do you see that? Even when the screenshot is opened on another tab and zoomed in I stll can not read the text. I can barely discern it is text at all.

[Hoser Rob]

How on earth do you see that? Even when the screenshot is opened on another tab and zoomed in I stll can not read the text. I can barely discern it is text at all.

I think that's because the resolution of the uploaded pic isn't that high.

[Hoser Rob]

My current set up is running on MX Linux Xfce with the xfwm replaced by i3gaps. I'm wondering whether it would be possible to do the same on Mint's Debian. Thoughts? Is i3 and i3 gaps in the Mint repos, anyone?

I'm actually typing this on my MX 21 KDE box, not my Mint Xfce one. But searching "ubuntu package ..." and "debian package ...." (handy search terms) tells me that i3 is in the repos of both but i3-gaps isn't. So i3 should be fine in both ubuntu based Mint and LMDE. I'm not confident that i3-gaps would be superior enough for me to use an unsupported WM.

icewm is in the repos of both. I mistakenly confused that with i3 before. I still think I'd install antix and use icewm, they have it set up very nicely. In fact I am going to install it in my POS netbook pretty soon.

[Termy]

I'm not confident that i3-gaps would be superior enough for me to use an unsupported WM.

Don't worry, i3-gaps it's quite popular and is perfectly fine, but it's unfortunately not the repositories (yet); this is exactly what stopped me installed it for a very long time. As I got better with Linux and familiarized myself with compiling software, I wound up just compiling i3-gaps from source, and I'm so glad I did! I don't expect everyone will want to mess around with that, though.

As for whether i3-gaps is worth it: yes, I think it is, at least for me. Not only does it improve the general aesthetic, allowing the wallpaper to be seen a bit more, but it makes it easier to see each individual window and so which is active by the window borders. Granted, it comes at the cost of precious screen real estate, but whether that's worth it or not is up to you. BTW, i3-gaps is just a popular fork of i3, which adds support for gaps between windows (and the configuration thereof), as the name suggests.

If you're happy in i3 though, then I wouldn't bother with compiling i3-gaps.

How on earth do you see that? Even when the screenshot is opened on another tab and zoomed in I stll can not read the text. I can barely discern it is text at all.

You're not meant to be able to read the text, really; I put up the screenshots so you can get a general idea of the layout, not what's on the terminals. However, if you're curious, I have the music player open on the bottom-right, which is MoC (Music on Console), and it looks like I'm working on a project on the left and top-right, using Vim (Vi-IMproved).

I had to make the image so small, because these forums put such a heavy restriction on image submissions, likely due to the cost of the servers.

[Hoser Rob]

I'm sure i3-gaps works fine. I'm still going to install Antix and use icewm, they've done a pretty good job setting it up OOTB.