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Used i3 fulltime for more than a year. It's great for building extremely lightweight environments that will run on any machine. The productivity side of it is

Used i3 fulltime for more than a year. It's great for building extremely lightweight environments that will run on any machine. The productivity side of it is slightly exaggerated (in terms of tiling vs stacking manager), and i didn't find myself saving so much time. One thing i've always missed from the stacking manager is the window overlap - i do that quite often, especially when reading something while doing stuff on another window - most sites have side panels that don't react well to changing window sizes and with stacking window, you can just place them optimally and hide the stuff you don't want to see. The only issue i've had with it is how it handled popups. For example the andoid emulator window was a pain, also some dialog windows. I don't think i will be ever coming back to tiling WMs. It was nice infatuation.

marcus_holmes 6y ago
I use i3 and the productivity for coding-type tasks is great. Fiddling with my i3 config and i3bar is a favourite procrastination, and I can genuinely say it's changed the way I use my computer. But Zoom is a nightmare. It's clearly only designed to work with conventional windows. It opens new windows a lot, and each time it does that, i3 grabs the new window and puts it in whatever workspace my mouse is currently at. I'm constantly shifting Zoom windows between fullscreen and normal mode, and switching workspaces for them. Starting a breakout session immediately kills everything and I have to start moving everything around again. I get that Zoom isn't optimising their application for Linux, and especially not for i3. Fair enough, I'm in a tiny market segment here. But it's annoying enough that I want to warn people who want to try i3 that (no fault of i3) some applications really don't work well with it.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
  You can force these zoom windows by name / class / title to always open in specific workspace if it makes your life any easier. I haven't used zoom myself so difficult to tell.
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  A couple of possibilities for Zoom: • You could make Zoom windows float by default in your i3 config. I seem to recall there was some app I did that with on my old laptop where I used i3. • Judging by Windows behaviour (which may or may not be the same), it’s Zoom’s fullscreen mode that’s the real problem, most readily triggered by screen sharing. Settings → Share Screen → Window size when screen sharing lets you change it so that this doesn’t throw it into fullscreen mode. This may well improve things. (I know the fullscreen mode when sharing is awful on Windows, given that I’m doing that multiple times a day at present I’ve been meaning to write some AutoHotkey to open the desired things and lay my screen out the way I want it, rather than wasting ten or twenty seconds each time. On i3 I would have done the equivalent of this long ago.)
  - chrisweekly 6y ago
    Thanks for the tip. I'm on macOS using Divvy. When I'm on a zoom and its fullscreen mode has been triggered, I hit esc to end fullscreen, then cmd-shift-(arrow or enter) to put it wherever I want it. With 2 monitors and a handful of easily-defined, keymapped positions, I've never felt a need for autotiling per se. (If I were to get into more sysadmin / SRE -type terminal-based work, I think I'd reach for tux in that context; shrug.)
    - shrikant 6y ago
      TBH this is exactly what I do in KDE as well. I've set up window "quick tiling" keyboard shortcuts in the KWin config. Existing applications just remember where they're supposed to be, while new application windows float by default, and I can snap them into a tiled position on any monitor with a few keystrokes.
  - dimitrios1 6y ago
    Can also just use Zoom web client. But my guess is if you are in the position where you can use something like i3 for your daily driver, you are in the position to use something better than Zoom.
    - 6y ago
- paledot 6y ago
  I was actually impressed that Zoom's screen sharing works at all in i3.
- veddox 6y ago
  Zoom on Linux is terrible anyway. On my system (quad-core Thinkpad with Ubuntu 20.04), Zoom consistently starts using 4*100% CPU during long calls.
nickjj 6y ago
> One thing i've always missed from the stacking manager is the window overlap - i do that quite often You could probably float those windows to solve this problem right? I do agree about overlap being useful. In some cases overlapping ends up being one of the most efficient ways to use a few tools together to create an optimized workflow. I made a video about this recently around taking advantage of "always on top"[0]. It's not an example of using a tiled window manager, but it does show how overlapping windows on another window lets you comfortably use a few programs together in a nice way. All operating systems have tools to get this behavior. [0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/always-on-top-lets-you-pin-a-window-to-the-foreground https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/always-on-top-lets-you-pin-a-...

marcus_holmes 6y ago

I use i3 and the productivity for coding-type tasks is great. Fiddling with my i3 config and i3bar is a favourite procrastination, and I can genuinely say it's changed the way I use my computer. But Zoom is a nightmare. It's clearly only designed to work with conventional windows. It opens new windows a lot, and each time it does that, i3 grabs the new window and puts it in whatever workspace my mouse is currently at. I'm constantly shifting Zoom windows between fullscreen and normal mode, and switching workspaces for them. Starting a breakout session immediately kills everything and I have to start moving everything around again. I get that Zoom isn't optimising their application for Linux, and especially not for i3. Fair enough, I'm in a tiny market segment here. But it's annoying enough that I want to warn people who want to try i3 that (no fault of i3) some applications really don't work well with it.

9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
You can force these zoom windows by name / class / title to always open in specific workspace if it makes your life any easier. I haven't used zoom myself so difficult to tell.
chrismorgan 6y ago
A couple of possibilities for Zoom: • You could make Zoom windows float by default in your i3 config. I seem to recall there was some app I did that with on my old laptop where I used i3. • Judging by Windows behaviour (which may or may not be the same), it’s Zoom’s fullscreen mode that’s the real problem, most readily triggered by screen sharing. Settings → Share Screen → Window size when screen sharing lets you change it so that this doesn’t throw it into fullscreen mode. This may well improve things. (I know the fullscreen mode when sharing is awful on Windows, given that I’m doing that multiple times a day at present I’ve been meaning to write some AutoHotkey to open the desired things and lay my screen out the way I want it, rather than wasting ten or twenty seconds each time. On i3 I would have done the equivalent of this long ago.)
- chrisweekly 6y ago
  Thanks for the tip. I'm on macOS using Divvy. When I'm on a zoom and its fullscreen mode has been triggered, I hit esc to end fullscreen, then cmd-shift-(arrow or enter) to put it wherever I want it. With 2 monitors and a handful of easily-defined, keymapped positions, I've never felt a need for autotiling per se. (If I were to get into more sysadmin / SRE -type terminal-based work, I think I'd reach for tux in that context; shrug.)
  - shrikant 6y ago
    TBH this is exactly what I do in KDE as well. I've set up window "quick tiling" keyboard shortcuts in the KWin config. Existing applications just remember where they're supposed to be, while new application windows float by default, and I can snap them into a tiled position on any monitor with a few keystrokes.
- dimitrios1 6y ago
  Can also just use Zoom web client. But my guess is if you are in the position where you can use something like i3 for your daily driver, you are in the position to use something better than Zoom.
  - 6y ago
paledot 6y ago
I was actually impressed that Zoom's screen sharing works at all in i3.
veddox 6y ago
Zoom on Linux is terrible anyway. On my system (quad-core Thinkpad with Ubuntu 20.04), Zoom consistently starts using 4*100% CPU during long calls.

nickjj 6y ago

> One thing i've always missed from the stacking manager is the window overlap - i do that quite often You could probably float those windows to solve this problem right? I do agree about overlap being useful. In some cases overlapping ends up being one of the most efficient ways to use a few tools together to create an optimized workflow. I made a video about this recently around taking advantage of "always on top"[0]. It's not an example of using a tiled window manager, but it does show how overlapping windows on another window lets you comfortably use a few programs together in a nice way. All operating systems have tools to get this behavior. [0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/always-on-top-lets-you-pin-a-window-to-the-foreground https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/always-on-top-lets-you-pin-a-...