3 ms·

For me (and most, I guess) it’s about flow! Switched to i3 on a nixos box a few months ago - never leaving the tiling vm, or nixos for that matter. I suddenly

For me (and most, I guess) it’s about flow! Switched to i3 on a nixos box a few months ago - never leaving the tiling vm, or nixos for that matter. I suddenly use workspaces which I never used to and I have coms in one space (mail/slack/teams), terms with vim etc in one, and web browser in a third. Never looking around for windows and draging stuff around is magical for the workflow. With fzf and a launcher & window switcher my workflow have never been more streamlined. Nixos helps as well, but that’s a different topic. :)

byecomputer 6y ago
In my little world, I don't need more than perhaps a few windows at attention simultaneously, and working out how to space them when it does happen is pretty breezy. The physical metaphor of dragging stuff works for me, too, and—while the Vim folks might ridicule me—I think the computer mouse is actually quite excellent and fills in the gaps quicker than remembering keyboard shortcuts for some things. Also really great for when I'm drunk, because I'm not in the mood to play spy games with the desktop when I just want the window to go over there. I can afford the calories my arm burns in the drag-n-drop process.
- jeromenerf 6y ago
  Sway, the i3 clone for wayland, actually allows to use the mouse to drag and drop a window or group of windows. This is something supported in other window managers. The best of both worlds? I agree that the mouse can be great and effective. Plan9 / Acme editor is a great example. I also like the additional buttons when browsing, you know, prev/next.
  - byecomputer 6y ago
    I appreciate the tip. GNOME 3, which I understand had a rocky start, has been honestly the most intuitive and usable desktop I've had yet, so I can't say I'm in the market for now. But it's always fun checking new things out, so I will keep those in mind.
    - cdiddy2 6y ago
      material shell for gnome might be fun to try out. Its very easy to switch on and off from the gnome environment
doix 6y ago
Agreed! It's all about the workflows! The i3 API is really easy to hack on as well, which makes creating a specialized workflow really easy. I was working on a project that was hosted on AWS + k8s and had 3 different enviorments: dev/uat/prod. I added a tiny script in my .zshrc that would check the workspace name on startup and automatically configure kubectl and a bunch of other things to match the workspace name. So every terminal I opened in that workspace was automatically configured for that enviorment. That was fine for one project, but I had to maintain a fair few projects so I ended up having to create groups of workspaces. I used this patch: https://gist.github.com/woodensquares/c1afc4fb56b4d9d21fa261fb4b28b092 https://gist.github.com/woodensquares/c1afc4fb56b4d9d21fa261... that lets you hide workspaces from the bar if the ended with a prefix(I used _boop because I'm a child). So then all workspaces names become <group_num><ws_num>:<name>_boop apart from the active group, which is just <ws_num>:<name>. If you are in group 1 and switch to group 3, 1:dev would get renamed to 11:dev_boop and 31:name_boop would get renamed to 1:name and get automatically selected. I also have a "scratch" workspace that is always visible regardless of group, I called it "i". Since it doesn't start with a number, it doesn't get affected by the workspace groups script and is always visible. I usually just stick irc there and my music player so I can access it regardless of which group/project I am working on. I'm still waiting for this proposal to go through: https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/3818 https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/3818 so that I don't need to use a custom build of i3. I hacked it all together in one afternoon and it's been working ever since. Before this I really struggled to context switch between all the different projects I was working on/supporting. This made it much more managable and got me a bunch of praise for how quickly I can fix problems/answer questions. I can't imagine trying to do my job without this setup anymore.

byecomputer 6y ago

In my little world, I don't need more than perhaps a few windows at attention simultaneously, and working out how to space them when it does happen is pretty breezy. The physical metaphor of dragging stuff works for me, too, and—while the Vim folks might ridicule me—I think the computer mouse is actually quite excellent and fills in the gaps quicker than remembering keyboard shortcuts for some things. Also really great for when I'm drunk, because I'm not in the mood to play spy games with the desktop when I just want the window to go over there. I can afford the calories my arm burns in the drag-n-drop process.

jeromenerf 6y ago
Sway, the i3 clone for wayland, actually allows to use the mouse to drag and drop a window or group of windows. This is something supported in other window managers. The best of both worlds? I agree that the mouse can be great and effective. Plan9 / Acme editor is a great example. I also like the additional buttons when browsing, you know, prev/next.
- byecomputer 6y ago
  I appreciate the tip. GNOME 3, which I understand had a rocky start, has been honestly the most intuitive and usable desktop I've had yet, so I can't say I'm in the market for now. But it's always fun checking new things out, so I will keep those in mind.
  - cdiddy2 6y ago
    material shell for gnome might be fun to try out. Its very easy to switch on and off from the gnome environment

doix 6y ago

Agreed! It's all about the workflows! The i3 API is really easy to hack on as well, which makes creating a specialized workflow really easy. I was working on a project that was hosted on AWS + k8s and had 3 different enviorments: dev/uat/prod. I added a tiny script in my .zshrc that would check the workspace name on startup and automatically configure kubectl and a bunch of other things to match the workspace name. So every terminal I opened in that workspace was automatically configured for that enviorment. That was fine for one project, but I had to maintain a fair few projects so I ended up having to create groups of workspaces. I used this patch: https://gist.github.com/woodensquares/c1afc4fb56b4d9d21fa261fb4b28b092 https://gist.github.com/woodensquares/c1afc4fb56b4d9d21fa261... that lets you hide workspaces from the bar if the ended with a prefix(I used _boop because I'm a child). So then all workspaces names become <group_num><ws_num>:<name>_boop apart from the active group, which is just <ws_num>:<name>. If you are in group 1 and switch to group 3, 1:dev would get renamed to 11:dev_boop and 31:name_boop would get renamed to 1:name and get automatically selected. I also have a "scratch" workspace that is always visible regardless of group, I called it "i". Since it doesn't start with a number, it doesn't get affected by the workspace groups script and is always visible. I usually just stick irc there and my music player so I can access it regardless of which group/project I am working on. I'm still waiting for this proposal to go through: https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/3818 https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/3818 so that I don't need to use a custom build of i3. I hacked it all together in one afternoon and it's been working ever since. Before this I really struggled to context switch between all the different projects I was working on/supporting. This made it much more managable and got me a bunch of praise for how quickly I can fix problems/answer questions. I can't imagine trying to do my job without this setup anymore.