3 ms·
Window management is truly a preference thing. I feel the opposite of what you state. To me, a non tiling-window manager burdens me with moving and resizing wi
by city41 7y ago
Window management is truly a preference thing.
I feel the opposite of what you state. To me, a non tiling-window manager burdens me with moving and resizing windows, mostly with my mouse. With i3, its algorithm sizes and places the window ideally 90% of the time, and I fix up the 10% of the time with key commands, never needing my mouse.
My windows being so predictable and so easily maintained with the keyboard enables me to stay in flow much better. I basically never think about my windows, it's just a "solved problem" for me.
It's unfortunate that tiling window managers are really only available on Xorg based OSes. I feel if Windows and OSX had really good tiling window management (the available solutions are nowhere near as good as what something like i3 can do), then tiling window managers would be much more popular IMO.
- kimjongtrill 7y agoFor me the built in shortcuts to snap things to the left, right, and push to second monitor are all I really need and I get both tiling and non-tiling with windows/OS X/gnome... never understood why people go i3 when the shortcuts are built in to what you likely are already using. To each their own though, if i3 works better for y’all I think that is great too.
- neoromantique 7y agoShortcuts are great when you have two windows, not so much when you have more than four
- city41 7y agoYeah, it really is about preference. FWIW, i3 allows you to opt out of tiling if you really want to. For me it's alt+shift+space, and the window pops out onto its own layer, and can then be manipulated with the mouse.
- SuperPaintMan 7y agoYup, this is what I use for editing. Vifm in whatever directory I'm working it but small and floating. Mod+Spc focuses my nav, Mod+Spc to focus the underlying windows. Have it set up to spawn vim or VSCode instances using shared buffers and it's crazy handy. I can't go back to vimsplits!
- flyingcircus3 7y agoThe built-in snapping only works for two windows per screen though. If you want 3 or more, you're stuck with the mouse.
- doubleunplussed 7y agoThere's the gtile gnome shell extension. I have shortcuts defined to snap windows to predetermined regions of the screen, which can be defined on an arbitrary grid. That plus gnome's builtin shortcuts to move windows to different monitors and different desktops, and setting alt-tab to "switch windows directly" gives me pretty much everything I need. Windows don't start tiled, but this doesn't feel like a big drawback. When matplotlib pops up five plot windows I'd rather they stay the aspect ratio they were intended, anyway. But I'll snap my text editors, terminals, and file browser windows to half/quarter of the screen. It's pretty great, and I get to stay within GNOME which is the 'happy path' for linux desktop use IMHO.
- DyslexicAtheist 7y ago> and places the window ideally 90% of the time, and I fix up the 10% of the time you can replicate whatever setup you had using i3-save-tree which outputs a json file e.g i3-save-tree > .config/i3/workspace1.json and then load that upon startup (from your i3/config): exec --no-startup-id i3-msg 'workspace $ws1; append_layout ~/.config/i3/workspace1.json' or see full config mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22303128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22303128
- Kaze404 7y agoThere's also i3-layout-manager [https://github.com/klaxalk/i3-layout-manager https://github.com/klaxalk/i3-layout-manager], which lets you do this more easily. It integrates super nicely with Rofi, too.