That becomes a deterrent to trying the tiling window manager. One goal of the project is to keep dwm minimal and small. Linux provides a lot of customization. Yes, because you can configure the tiles to have very thin or no borders. And I hate your captcha. It is neither bloated nor fancy. However, I do not have awesome so I cannot test it. So, I'm interested in trying out a tiling window manager for my laptop. i3 requires more keystrokes to get the layout I want when opening more then 2 windows. The site may not work properly if you don't, If you do not update your browser, we suggest you visit, Press J to jump to the feed. In Awesome, the default is to have all window titles listed in series, similar to many taskmanager bars. Could you enlighten me a little bit on what you mean by Dynamic vs Explicit? -- Peter. For those who have used Tiling window managers longer than I have, what do you think of them? On one hand, I really liked Awesome's behavior, specifically the ability to control which tabs are shown, and the ability to have several tabs/workspaces shown on the same screen at once. I3 is a tiling window manager. The goal of a window manager is to control the appearance and placement of windows in a windowing system. That being said, it seems to be missing some of the functionality I really loved with Awesome. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast, Looks like you're using new Reddit on an old browser. From experience: just be careful when switching to tiling wm, you may like them so much that seeing anything not-tiling will make you cringe. Other popular tiling window managers include wmii and xmonad. (I don't know lua, and I have no major problem with learning something new, but in the half a month that I used awesome, I never really got it setup the way I wanted it. As usual in i3, do it with a keyboard shortcut. Xfce was my choice of desktop environment before I found i3. With xfce4, have you tried looking at the settings under "window manager"? tagged ubuntu, i3. I created a poll on YouTube for you, the viewer, to help me decide on my next window manager to use on my main production machine. Though there is still some work to be done in this area. For me, they look like the same thing, except for the fact that tabs are horizontal and stacks are vertically displayed. awesome tries to complete these tools with what we miss: an extensible, highly configurable window manager. I’ve found that on a laptop that I connect and disconnect to external monitors freely, i3 is more dynamic and allows me to preserve my tiling layouts as I move around. The downside is, I didn't like Awesome's configuration methods at all. The main benefit is that you don't often need to switch contexts from the keyboard to the mouse. The only thing I really miss from awesome is the ability to have a floating workspace. Besides the config part I was a happy awesome user till I bought a 21:9 monitor and the fixed awesome layouts just wouldn't cut it. Pro. You will not find many distros using the i3 tiling window manager. Warning. The trees of splits, tabs and stacks were just what I needed, the documentation is great and with just a few easy changes to the configuration I was happy with it. I've read about the different tiling window managers on the wiki, I've tried Awesome before, and I've seen several videos of i3 in use. It always felt random to me, which means that you always need to position your windows manually after opening them with the … How would you compare i3 to awesome, awesome to i3, etc.? Just what I need. In addition, i3 is flexible. Latest Videos. To save screen real state, I prefer not to have window titles right on top of each window. In i3, a workspace is an easy way to group windows. I used AwesomeWM for a about a year on my netbook, and I still love it. Navigating and manipulating windows was a bit awkward at first, but eventually I found that i3 makes it much easier to manipulate layouts just like I wanted in just a few keystrokes. To achieve this goal, awesome has been designed as a framework window manager. It is an invisible workspace that shows up in the middle of the other workspaces by pressing a shortcut. I have long outstanding issues with my Awesome config, but overall behavior better matches my work flow. Awesome was the first window manager to be ported to use the asynchronous XCB library instead of XLib, making it much more responsive than most other window managers. The control panel is accessed with the keyboard shortcut Super key + c, for example. I'm an i3 wm user for about 2 months, I think. To conclude, as in every one of these threads, individual preference trumps what anyone else says. (Yes, it's annoying that it's not h/j/k/l, i rebound them..). Switched to i3, the config is sane, the docs are better, the manual tiling allows me to have any layout easily. Reg… When you start using i3, you need to memorize a few of those shortcuts to get around and, with time, you'll use more of them. Some examples: I3 is fully configurable, and you can control every aspect of it by updating the default configuration file. These won't float everyone's boat but for me they were both super important. You need to learn a few basic shortcuts to get around at the beginning, but they'll soon feel natural and you'll start using them without thinking. Yes. This is a convenient way to access windows or programs that you frequently use, such as an email client or your music player. With the Linux kernel I can use Firefox, my VPN, Kile, Tor, and Krita on a T5500 CPU. Thanks, Pretty much exactly what I was going to say. I use i3 standalone because it's fast and lightweight. Because i3 is a window manager, it doesn't provide tools to enable customizations; you need external tools for that. You can even change i3's configuration to always assign specific applications to their own workspaces. Hello! Finally, for more advanced users, i3 provides a full interprocess communication (IPC) interface that allows you to use your favorite language to develop scripts or programs for even more customization options. Screencast of v4.1. However, the config is not in plaintext and it does not dynamically tile like i3. window manager, completely written from scratch. 1. left|right|top-left|top-right|etc but I found the best way with the xfce and tmux. LUA was a bit tricky at first, but after spending some time reading scripts, solutions and fragments of tutorials it started to make sense and I managed to write up some simple widgets for my panel. I3 is flexible and can be customized in several ways to improve the visual experience. For example, you can put the browser on one workspace, the terminal on another, an email client on a third, etc. For more details, consult i3's documentation. Tiling window managers represent windows as tiles, or split views, with windows displayed next to one another, but with none of the windows overlapping. But I still don't understand the differences between tabs (Mod+w) vs stacks (Mod+s). It's meant to have clean, readable code, handle multimonitor in a good way, and not impose stupid limits on SLOC (I don't think awesome does, but DWM has a limit). Hi. I recently tried i3. From my roommate's reluctant and educated point of view, we shouldn't do more than 2 things with this computer: VPN client, Steam, a Facebook tab, ProtonMail, or the games he'd play with. If you end up not liking i3, I'd give awesome a try. XMonad. Screenshot: https://postimg.cc/image/46672jx31/. I used to use "ion" a long time ago (2003 ish), and awesome comes close to how I remember it, although there's still some things I liked about Ion that I haven't seen reproduced in any of the current tiling WMs. Though in my case I 'got tiling' only after I decided to give it a full-blown go on my main machine (as opposed to switching for an hour and 'playing with it' - I don't think that will work; too much of a paradigm shift). Indeed, the only way to change dwm default configuration is to i3 - improved tiling WM. It’s very fast… Since the windows are automatically positioned, you can start typing your commands right away. awesome is a free and open-source next-generation tiling manager for X built to be fast … I've been using fvwm for many years. I personally did not like it, but it is a very solid window manager. I really like it, and I'll probably continue using it even if I don't have the nice GTK themes, but obviously it would be nicer to Configuration is achieved via plain text file and extending i3 is possible using its Unix domain socket and JSON based IPC interface from many programming languages.. Like wmii, i3 uses a control system very similar to that of vi. Dynamic window managers are window managers that can dynam… I use XFCE with i3 shortcuts and rofi, truly the best of both worlds. Perhaps I could have a 2nd i3-status bar + using the i3-client to pull window titles. Stacking window managers behave analogously to pieces of paper on a physical desktop, they can be stacked on top of one another, with the one at the top of the stack being the one with which the user sees and interacts. Fully extensible with Lua. It's extremely fast, small, dynamic and heavily extensible using the Lua programming language. Awesome's Status bar meets my needs though. Almost 10 years ago (and who knows how many years I used it before that) I wrote post on my custom FVWM based setup:http://skliarie.blogspot.com/2008/11/my-45-workplaces.html, And needless to say - I still use it, doubling my performance as sysadmin :), Arie: Can you send me your fvwm config file? Hybrid. It covers all my needs and is very light. i3-status has a nice feel, really like the design of piping anything. https://victorhckinthefreeworld.com/2017/04/12/i3-en-gnulinux-para-curio... http://skliarie.blogspot.com/2008/11/my-45-workplaces.html. If you use the terminal frequently, having a good window manager is essential to your well being. It can be configured during runtime. Very Unix philosophy friendly. Switching workspaces is quick and easy. Docs; Screens; FAQ; Contact; Bugs; i3-2.png VIM, MPlayer. If you switch to that workspace, you switch to that monitor—without moving your hand off the keyboard. It's a good choice! The target platforms are GNU/Linux and BSD operating systems, our code is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) under the BSD license. Another annoyance with regular desktop environments: the windows positioning, especially when you open a new window. ), On the other hand, I've heard that i3 is a little easier to configure, which is good. I find I only use the 'tile' and 'floating' layout in Awesome. You can have floating windows in i3 as well. However, my experience with the documentation is that it is horrendously bad. i3 is a tiling window manager designed for X11, inspired by wmii and written in C. It supports tiling, stacking, and tabbing layouts, which it handles dynamically. I also looked at this question, which points to installing lxappearance for this issue in Awesome Window Manager. I used i3 for a pretty long time. the default binds for these are j/k/l/; (navigate containers) and Shift+(j/k/l/;) for move containers. I find i3's window containers like to equally scale all windows in a little limiting. Recent posts Bash Helpers for Quick Installs August 14, 2020 Arrested DevOps … I'm sorry, but a lot of points you bring up as advantages of i3 are common to most window managers, including the ones from XFCE, GNOME and KDE. i3 exists virtually everywhere, on every Linux distribution. Awesome can be skinned, configured, and extended with Lua, a language with a programming model similar to the ubiquitous Javascript. Does anyone know what I need to do to "de-uglify" i3? The dwm window manager focuses more on being lightweight. He is currently interested in hacking stuff using the Go Programming... 6 open source tools for staying organized, Free online course: RHEL Technical Overview. Deepin; The … For me the biggest reason I switched to i3 from awesome was sane defaults. You can group them in different ways according to your workflow. For example, to open a new terminal, press +. Material Shell is a fantastic new GNOME Shell extension/user experience currently in development. Red Hat and the Red Hat logo are trademarks of Red Hat, Inc., registered in the United States and other countries. A friend of mine recommended it as a good first tiling WM, and it was easy to get started with. A Windows Manager like i3 showed me that a status bar and an application launcher are enough. Many window managers also have a --replace option, like so: awesome --replace&, called from a shell or startup option. In the end I went back to Awesome. Finally, there is another, special type of workspace in i3: the scratchpad. TL;DR: Both are great, it just boils down to preference. No resizing windows with the mouse so you can see many terminals at the same time, it's all done automatically, and when you know the bindings its second nature and very fast to use. With … With practice, it means you'll improve the speed and efficiency of your workflow. It helps you be more productive whether it’s for your work or if you’re doing it as a hobby. Following are the top five reasons I use the i3 window manager and recommend it for a better Linux desktop experience. Based upon the experiences we made when wanting to hack/fix wmii, The window layout isn't just a layout, it morphs and changes according to your needs at any given moment. Ricardo has been a Linux enthusiast for over 20 years. It works well for me, but I'm also interested in any good fvwm schemes others (such as yourself) have found agreeable. A window manager controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system. I'm a happy Plasma user, but time ago I tried i3wm. Essentially the same memory footprint as conky, and not as blingy - but user can create their own … One big thing I missed with i3 was the window navigation. It is designed to be simple and efficient. e.g. Until last year, Xfce was the closest to what I consider a good compromise between features and performance. You are responsible for ensuring that you have the necessary permission to reuse any work on this site. Using the i3 window manager. If you are feeling adventurous and want to install additional DEs or WMs you can reference these guides: Install Desktop Environments and Window Managers; Choose from a wide selection available in our repositories!