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Last month, I posted a list of tools and tips that I use almost every day. Upon my return from vacation, I have actually swapped one of the tools out for an alternative - and have since solved every gripe I had previously. Specifically, I switched to i3wm from AwesomeWM.
Many of you might be thinking “Why? They’re both tiling window managers!”. And that’s entirely true. However, i3’s default approach is much more sane (to me) than AwesomeWM’s, and it offers a systray (which many tiling window managers do not - although AwesomeWM offered one as well). The default keybindings, and the way you manage your windows, just seem more logical to me. Not to mention the configuration file for AwesomeWM is in lua, which is not a language I use often. Instead, i3 has a more legible approach.
Those are the base reasons for why I considered i3 over AwesomeWM. Once I decided that it could work, I downloaded the community image of Manjaro Linux (based off ArchLinux) that ran i3 by default. Installing it into a virtual machine was a snap, and then I spent some time in the VM, trying out my normal daily operations. I discovered a variety of things - including i3’s tabbed mode. Tabbed mode, for anyone who hasn’t tried i3, is where you can have multiple applications open in a workspace, but each one gets full height/width, and you instead have the window titles available to you at the top of the screens (like tabs in a browser). So if you, like me, organize your workspaces into certain tasks, it makes the organization easier, without being forced to move a window elsewhere in order to get the full amount of space to work with.
The last thing I got enthused about was the large variety of screenshots for i3 systems I’ve seen. Including Font Awesome icons instead of workspace title - which is exactly what I’ve now set up. Admittedly, both i3 and AwesomeWM could theoretically have been made to look however you want, but I find the approach in i3 to be easier for me to comprehend and to work with, as opposed to the themes in AwesomeWM.
My advice for anyone who wants to try something like this, is to find a distribution that comes preconfigured and try it out in a VM. This makes the testing period a little shorter, and gives you a basis for configurations without having to necessarily google for screenshots of what you’d like.
Included below is a screenshot of my current system. The left monitor shows rofi (a program launcher), and the right is demonstrating tabbed mode.
I hope this article may have enticed at least one or two readers to give i3 a shot (or tiling window managers in general). I first tried TWMs about a decade ago, and since then, I’ve never felt anywhere near as productive in traditional window managers (in any OS). If you have questions, or comments, feel free to email me at lswest34+fcm@gmail.com.