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I3: The Improved Tiling Window Manager

Angad Sharma on April 09, 2020

One of the most popular tiling window managers out there, i3 is written from scratch. The developers claim that it is targeted towards advanced use...
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Dian Fay

I've been using i3-gaps for a few years now and love it. The built-in status bar is perfectly okay, and i3-blocks adds a lot of useful capabilities without having to do too much customization, but I switched to polybar a while back.

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Angad Sharma

Thanks Dian. The polybar project looks very interesting.

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Demian Brecht

I'm a bit old school. Have you tried conky before? Curious about differences between that and polybar (assume conky is configured as a bar as well)

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Dian Fay

I didn't know you could do that with conky -- I'd only seen it in panel or wallpaper form, and haven't used it myself.

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Oleksandr

Serious question here. Why author of i3 doesn't want to merge i3-gaps features into mainstream? Why would they want to split resources instead of unite and work together to make their life easier and product better?

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Christian Parpart

You say i3 is certainly not the best by far. ....

What makes you judge that? Is there anything you can share to strengthen that statement?

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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.

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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 :)

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KaySoohyun

I love i3! And I just discovered i3-gaps and I wanted it! Thanks to you now I have i3-gaps, it's easier than I thought and what I read on the web. Thanks you <3!