5 ms·
On my personal machine, I use i3wm, and on my work machine I use OSX with Spectacle (a window tiler). For me, the killer feature of i3wm is not how it lets me
by happimess 7y ago
On my personal machine, I use i3wm, and on my work machine I use OSX with Spectacle (a window tiler).
For me, the killer feature of i3wm is not how it lets me arrange windows on my screen, but how it lets me switch between them. With OSX, I have to maintain a mental stack of recently-used applications: If I'm in my terminal and I want to get to firefox, I have to hit cmd-tab, or maybe cmd-tab-tab, or maybe cmd-tab-tab-tab. At least once a day, I make an off-by-one error and get stuck in a context-shift loop until I pause, think, and do the needful. With i3wm, I have 10 workspaces, and each is available with a single chord press. I have my own conventions about what's where, and there's no cognitive load associated with switching between text editor and documentation, or whatever.
Along the same lines, I like to keep a roguelike open for quick breaks, but ideally I'd never accidentally switch to a video game. OSX gives you no ability to punt an application from your cmd-tab list except to quit the application. With i3wm, I keep that on workspace 0, and have never accidentally switched over to it.
You may think I'm being precious, but it really does make a huge difference in my ability to stay in the zone.
- flyingcircus3 7y agoDo you manually move certain apps to certain workspaces, or do you have configurations to do it automatically? I've tried setting up the config to always have Firefox on workspace 3 and Slack on 4, but it doesn't work. I can do it with terminal, though. I've also done the xprop command to find the WM_CLASS property, but still no luck
- happimess 7y agoI move everything around manually on login, and then try not to log out. For a while I was using xmonad, and setting things to automatically land on the right workspace was easy there, but ultimately I like the i3wm experience better. I saw something in the i3 docs about this feature, but it didn't work on the first try and I didn't dig deeper.
- Kubuxu 7y agoSee my dotfiles: https://github.com/Kubuxu/dotfiles/blob/master/i3/config.base#L193-L211 https://github.com/Kubuxu/dotfiles/blob/master/i3/config.bas... 'assign' allows you make so if window opens, it opens on given screen Lower, you can see me switch to given workspace before autostarting apps.
- flyingcircus3 7y agoI've tried the assign keyword, but I can't get it to work with Firefox or slack assign [class="Firefox] 3 assign [class="Slack"] 4 But it doesn't work for me
- cycomanic 7y agoIt definitely works. I'm on mobile now but remember that the two parameters in the wm_class correspond to name and class (I always forget which is which) . Also you can use regex in the matching iirc