5 ms·

Regarding the mouse... thats the entire point of i3, i.e. to make it all keyboard-driven. It's sort of like saying "the problem with cars is that they don't ma

Regarding the mouse... thats the entire point of i3, i.e. to make it all keyboard-driven. It's sort of like saying "the problem with cars is that they don't make effective use of the horse". i3 doesn't do anything to prevent you using the mouse for whatever application you like.

shawnz 7y ago
I understand that's a design goal of i3. I wasn't specifically talking about i3 though, in fact it seems like every tiling window manager has that philosophy and I think it is a mistake. Enabling effective use of the mouse doesn't negate the ability to use the keyboard effectively too -- they serve different use cases.
- robto 7y ago
  My mouse is actually critical to how I use i3 - I've got a lenovo thinkpad usb keyboard, with the left, middle, and right mouse buttons below the spacebar and the red nub for the pointer. I use focus-follow-mouse and when I need to change my active window I just flick the mouse over to where it needs to be - it's super fast. It also works really well with laptop trackpads and an actual mouse. I know other window managers allow you to use focus-follow-mouse, but I haven't found any that make it nearly as effective as i3.
- Slenth 7y ago
  Would you mind elaborating on what use case you think a mouse could come in handy for when you would be using a tiling WM? I recently switched over to one and the only time I've used my mouse was when I had to click on something in Firefox.
  - omaranto 7y ago
    The mouse could be convenient to resize or rearrange windows. For example, it would be nice if dragging one window onto another swapped them. I think that would be faster than swapping them with i3's shortcuts.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    Alternatively you can use tridactyl to click on links with hint keys.
badsectoracula 7y ago
The point is to use the mouse for window management not just on the applications. Now, i haven't used i3, but from a tiling window manager i'd expect at minimum that i can drag-drop windows with the mouse between "zones" and resize the zone boundaries interactively with the mouse. For extra stuff i'd like using the wheel up/down on a title bar to minimize/restore a zone, drag-dropping a window over another window to create a zone made out of tab-like title bars, ctrl+clicking multiple titlebars to select multiple windows (so that, e.g, drag-dropping them to another zone would put all of them as tabbed windows in there or being able to close all of them either via a shortcut or via a popup menu command, and/or commands to merge them in one tabbed zone, or split tabbed zone(s) to individual zones), right clicking on a zone separator to offer a popup with commands to split/merge the zone, move the splitter at some specific percentage, etc, drag-dropping one or more windows at the edge of the screen to create a new zone (or set of zones for multiple windows). There are so many things you can add with a mouse, especially if instead of thinking of it as a car vs horse you think of it as what it actually is: an additional input device that is right next to your keyboard and unlike the keyboard it provides precise analog input for 2D motion. As a starting point you can check what pretty much every IDE with support for tiling does (e.g. the recent versions of Visual Studio - not VSCore, the real one).
- virtualwhys 7y ago
  i3 isn't really a Windows click-click-click style UI; you do most everything with the keyboard, including % based resizing, converting tiles to tabs or stacks, moving tiles from one section or virtual desktop to another, etc. It's really quite a powerful and easily configurable tool, so much so that I consider it to be an absolutely indispensable part of my day-to-day computing experience (working on a Mac, for example, is just depressing in comparison).
  - shawnz 7y ago
    But why? I think it would be hard to argue that the mouse isn't significantly more efficient for, e.g. resize operations than the keyboard. And you have one right there on your desk, don't you? Don't you find it to be a waste that it can't make effective use of all your input devices even in situations where they could provide advantages?

shawnz 7y ago

I understand that's a design goal of i3. I wasn't specifically talking about i3 though, in fact it seems like every tiling window manager has that philosophy and I think it is a mistake. Enabling effective use of the mouse doesn't negate the ability to use the keyboard effectively too -- they serve different use cases.

robto 7y ago
My mouse is actually critical to how I use i3 - I've got a lenovo thinkpad usb keyboard, with the left, middle, and right mouse buttons below the spacebar and the red nub for the pointer. I use focus-follow-mouse and when I need to change my active window I just flick the mouse over to where it needs to be - it's super fast. It also works really well with laptop trackpads and an actual mouse. I know other window managers allow you to use focus-follow-mouse, but I haven't found any that make it nearly as effective as i3.
Slenth 7y ago
Would you mind elaborating on what use case you think a mouse could come in handy for when you would be using a tiling WM? I recently switched over to one and the only time I've used my mouse was when I had to click on something in Firefox.
- omaranto 7y ago
  The mouse could be convenient to resize or rearrange windows. For example, it would be nice if dragging one window onto another swapped them. I think that would be faster than swapping them with i3's shortcuts.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  Alternatively you can use tridactyl to click on links with hint keys.

badsectoracula 7y ago

The point is to use the mouse for window management not just on the applications. Now, i haven't used i3, but from a tiling window manager i'd expect at minimum that i can drag-drop windows with the mouse between "zones" and resize the zone boundaries interactively with the mouse. For extra stuff i'd like using the wheel up/down on a title bar to minimize/restore a zone, drag-dropping a window over another window to create a zone made out of tab-like title bars, ctrl+clicking multiple titlebars to select multiple windows (so that, e.g, drag-dropping them to another zone would put all of them as tabbed windows in there or being able to close all of them either via a shortcut or via a popup menu command, and/or commands to merge them in one tabbed zone, or split tabbed zone(s) to individual zones), right clicking on a zone separator to offer a popup with commands to split/merge the zone, move the splitter at some specific percentage, etc, drag-dropping one or more windows at the edge of the screen to create a new zone (or set of zones for multiple windows). There are so many things you can add with a mouse, especially if instead of thinking of it as a car vs horse you think of it as what it actually is: an additional input device that is right next to your keyboard and unlike the keyboard it provides precise analog input for 2D motion. As a starting point you can check what pretty much every IDE with support for tiling does (e.g. the recent versions of Visual Studio - not VSCore, the real one).

virtualwhys 7y ago
i3 isn't really a Windows click-click-click style UI; you do most everything with the keyboard, including % based resizing, converting tiles to tabs or stacks, moving tiles from one section or virtual desktop to another, etc. It's really quite a powerful and easily configurable tool, so much so that I consider it to be an absolutely indispensable part of my day-to-day computing experience (working on a Mac, for example, is just depressing in comparison).
- shawnz 7y ago
  But why? I think it would be hard to argue that the mouse isn't significantly more efficient for, e.g. resize operations than the keyboard. And you have one right there on your desk, don't you? Don't you find it to be a waste that it can't make effective use of all your input devices even in situations where they could provide advantages?