DEV Community

Discussion on: I3: The Improved Tiling Window Manager

Collapse
 
l04db4l4nc3r profile image
Angad Sharma

Sure. Although i3 is a pretty solid window manager, others like awesomewm come with a lot of things right out of the box, which you would otherwise have to configure in i3, namely comprehensive application and shortcut menus. Moreover, I feel dwm is more portable than i3 in the sense that you can make your own build and pass the binary around from system to system rather than maintaining config files like you have to do in i3. Plus to make proper use of i3, you need rely on a lot of third party software, whereas in dwm you can use commit diffs from the original repo.

Having said that, the part I love about i3 is that is uses XCB instead of XLIB, and hence performs better than the alternatives which use xlib. But other window managers have also caught up to the same. Awesomewm also uses xcb.

Collapse
 
christianparpart profile image
Christian Parpart • Edited

Thanks. I generally agree. But the portability argument is a little low. I personally believe that i3 is at least as portable as dwm. Also, requiring the user to apply diffs and force them to recompile, or compile at all, is not really what a general user should be required to. I know that dwm attempts to follow the spirit of suckless here. So let's not go into the religious war of that kind ;-)

Thanks for your reply :)