i3 and sway
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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XMonad. Been using it for almost a decade, and very powerful. I3 I hear is also good.
I prefer the way XMonad handles multimonitor workspaces, but left for Sway due to wayland support.
need to give it a try. I'm stuck in the past times lol
Same here, but I'm about ready to accept Wayland... Seems like sway is the best option?
I haven't used XMonad in a long time, but it was my go-to for a few years. It was solid. The main issue is that you configure it in Haskell, and I don't know Haskell.
i3 all the way
Sorry to be the boring i3 user but it's a rock solid TWM. Plus I am using the autotiling mod and now it's even better :D
i3 aswell, its great.
This is the way.
i3 is what I've been using the past few years. I've tried others, but I always end back up with i3 as I've found nothing else to be as simple and efficient for my workflow, with 12 workspaces across 2 monitors.
Not sure if this counts as a tiling window manager, but I spend most of my time in emacs in full screen mode. I can create, delete, resize, and swap my windows.
Pop!_OS 20.04 LTS... I love how it combines tiling and stacking. Sure I could use workspaces instead of stacks, but with stacks... I can use both!
I've also used EXWM and am going to give it another whirl after I upgrade to emacs 28 with native comp
Does this support independent workspaces on each monitor? That's what kept me from using i3 on Plasma :(
Today I use Plasma, but if I need a tiling wm I use awesome. It's so great and customizable. If you're fine with Lua, is easy to config.
I’ve been using i3. Nothing super advanced but the config is easy and being able to reload in place is nice
Starting with i3 as my first, i tried a bunch of different ones. Xmonad and Qtile were the ones i liked the most but Qtile was buggy and Xmonad while working was super confusing to configure with haskell.
Also tried AwesomeWM, it felt a bit buggy to me in terms of window handling and DWM was just too complicated to patch and even with patches it was too basic
Ended up going back to i3, and then moved over to Sway.
i3 until the day I die
Edit: Why? Because I love how easy it is to get working, it's a nice balance between features and simplicity for me, and IPC features are great for some QoL plugins. Its configuration file format is simple enough, I like lua with wezterm and neovim but I don't really see the point with a WM, I just need to see my windows when I want, the way I want, and to switch to others.
Can you list some QoL mods for i3? I have been using autotiling for the last few months and it's great.
I too would be interested to know what plugins you use.
I love i3 and have used it for years and find myself fruitlessly using the most common keybinds in windows at work.
But my gripes over i3 are:
- If I don't know the name of the command, say a specific settings window, etc - then I'm hosed if I need it.
- It doesn't come with a lock screen by default, you need a plugin for it
Here's a list of plugins that may be useful:
- kitti3: quake style dropdown terminal
- tdrop: the same as kitti3, but I moved to wezterm due to kitty's design choice and tdrop fits the bill, it's also wm agnostic.
- i3-volume: integrates with dunst for me to pop up volume status when I change volume via keybinds.
- autotiling: A must have in my opinion. I seldom have more than 2 windows on a monitor, since I have two monitors and utilize other workspace, but there are times when I temporarily have multiple windows open and too lazy to group them into stacks or tabs.
- i3expo: I heard people have success with this as an alt-tabber with visualization. I just use dmenu and have scripts for window switching.
- wmfocus: quite useful if you have multiple monitors and multiple windows on each, instead of doing Super + h a few times to move to the left most window, I just use wmfocus and hop to it immediately.
- i3-extras: I just found this, perhaps it's of use.
Regarding your gripe #1, I don't quite understand? Do you mean you don't know the command of a program to type into your terminal to launch?
And gripe #2, if you mean i3lock, I'm okay with that, I like that i3 follows UNIX philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well, and because of that good i3lock forks exist! If it was baked into i3 then this might not be the case.
For i3-lock, I currently use i3lock-fancy-rapid, it's a weird name lol, but it is still dependent on the i3lock-color binary, which itself is a fork of i3lock.
I tried i3 back in 2019 and I've been using it ever since on my desktop.
My heart still belongs to enlightenment/e17 but I've been using i3 for the past few years, and then hyprland for the last 4 months or so. It's working out well.
Man e16 was the shit. If it played nice with hot-plugging monitors, I'd still use it today. It had some awesome themes, too.
What's e17 like? I've truthfully never used it, though I daily Terminology as a terminal emulator.
I usually use tiling add-ons for Gnome or KDE. So pop-shell or bismuth.
EXWM. I am a longtime Emacs user so merging the concepts of Emacs buffers and X windows is a huge benefit. Only one set of keybindings to worry about, all of my Emacs window management stuff works for X windows too. One less external dependency to worry about too. In a new environment (like when starting a new job etc) as long as I have my Emacs config I am good to go.
I'll have to give it a try again. I played with it a while back, but I was happy with GNOME at the time. What underlying version of emacs are you using? native comp?
EXWM is not particularly picky about Emacs versions or performance. I used to run with nativecomp but ended up turning it off since I value stability over performance. (nativecomp was pretty stable but I had some occasional issues)
The biggest caveat is that you must be very comfortable with whatever Emacs buffer/window management setup you use since you will be relying on that even more.
i3 is the one I keep coming back to
i3 gang rise up!
I've only tried i3 and it just works, so I stuck with it. After learning the hotkeys it never seems to get in the way (at least for my usage). Riced it a bit. Then some polybar sparkled in there. A wallpaper. What more can a guy want?
PaperVM. Works under gnome and has everything i need
Currently, I am using DWL and it is pretty nice. After moving to Wayland, I tried to use Sway for a while, but it does not really fit into my workflow well. But to be honest, even DWL is missing some things I want, and I am not really a fan of that it is written and configured in C. I am planning on trying to write my own tiling window manager in Rust when I have some time.
DWM due to it's suckless nature
DWM
LeftWM, because it's a really nice community to get involved with, and i like rust so i contributed a bit to the project
Recently I have been using river. It's extremely easy to configure via a shell script, and it's very fast and stable. It's another dwm clone
It's not exactly a dwm clone, it's way better than that. It takes all the best parts from dwm and bspwm, and I've been loving it so far
The binary split tree is bspwm's best and most important feature imo. I'm sad river doesn't follow that model.
River defers Layout management to an external program (rivertile). If you want a layout based on a binary split tree, you can write your own so-called layout generator
@cyclohexane for me it was and always will be bspwm. Once I had it configured it was the coziest of cozies.
I started with for a bit awm, however i am giving qtile a try since im learning how to code python so good practice.
I use i3, but to say that I like it is a bit overstated. It's fine, does what I expect the very basic of a tiling window manager to do. I used Nimdow for a while and it's pretty good, the default bar is way better than i3 (supports ANSI colour coding, mouse presses, etc.), but I could never quite get to grips with the tiling algorithm.
I'm working on my own WM though, it's not tiling per-se, I choose to call in non-overlapping and I'm trying to solve my gripes with i3. Basically windows should not be forcefully expanded if they don't want to. Try open galculator under i3 and watch the horror. And when expanded the size should be split based on their initial sizes. So if I have Firefox open and want to do something in a quick terminal window the terminal won't get 1/2 of the screen. Firefox wanted more space than the terminal initially, so the terminal gets to take up a smaller share of the space.
I used StumpWM for many years. It was great for most of my workflow and, being written in Common Lisp, you can recompile parts of it while it's running (I didn't do this often but it was a cool feature).
I've tried AwesomeWM but couldn't get anything going with it really.
I then moved on to Material Shell (yes that's a Gnome Extension) and it brought enough to really make me want to dig in more.
Now I'm slowly working on a Sway configuration on my Fedora 38 machine. Can't work in it yet, but unlike my attempt at AwesomeWM...I'm actually making progress on getting things setup. My 4 monitors were configured fairly easily, but now I need to figure out why dmenu isn't working to launch applications. Could be on my end since I'm using a Moonlander keyboard with a custom DVORAK profile.
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