i3WM Is My Favorite Window Manager - You Should Try It

Today I talk about why i3wm is the best window manager for me.
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#i3wm #windowmanagers #linux

[@DistroTube]

GNOME bros! Where ya at?!! j/k I'm actually posting this message from DWM. ;)

[@quantumastrologer5599]

Gnomebro who is eyefucking i3 reporting in.

[@swayamshree5951]

gnome and spectwm for life.

[@ohwow2074]

Gnome is the one DE that doesn't look like windows. That's why I like it more than stuff like KDE plasma.

[@ArniesTech]

@@ohwow2074 Indeed GNOME is somewhat unique and brings its own DNA to the table. Plus I like the Tiling Assistant feature 💪😌

[@OpusFocus1968]

I came back to i3 as well. It absolutely has great documentation. It's very capable and not feature limited. It also allows you to run much leaner than a desktop environment.

[@krzysztofp9316]

Hi, I used various WM, I used Qtile for a long time, but later I returned to i3 and from now on I use it all the time. I can confirm your opinion about i3.

[@ariathyf144]

Feeling in love with the workflow KDE is giving me in xerolinux, specially after few tweeks with the keybindings to handle workspaces and get rid of the visual fluff.. (KDE setting menu is intimidating/overloading at first but your just supposed to set things up once and move on, it took me weeks to pass the troubled period) Examples : - F12 to launch terminal - Type programs or file names directly on desktop to find and launch them (useful when there is many unused or testing ones) ADDITIONALLY to having the app launcher with one Super-key press - various super+keys to move around windows, maximise/reduce them, (a key to autotile like in popOS would be the cherry on top) , switch activities Unleast you adopt the Luke Smith binding style approach TWM tend to have extensive shortcuts combinaisons that are sometimes less effective than using DE. TWM pass the test of time and are more reliable in the long term since DE can have major workflow changes. It is safe to be flexible and explore them in case things go wrong is the DE projects (memories of gnome3..)

[@leblancbot3682]

clearly you meant why emacs is my favorite window manager

[@killzone3507]

when a text editor turns into a os

[@armeli]

You mispelled "vim" n_n

[@occultsupport]

tmux?

[@zizouhuweidi]

Qtile is my favourite. It's the perfect mix of simplicity out of the box and the ability to extend it in so many ways. I love Awesome too, but it can be intermediating at times to rice. My favourite DE has to be XFCE, being so modular, flexible, fast and doesn't have many dependencies. Being a Qtile user, I don't see much benefit in using something like BSPWM or DWM, so i3 is my third favourite given it has a couple of unique features and that it's compatible with Sway. I also like a couple of floating wms, like Berry and Openbox. So if I had to rank: 1- Qtile 1.5 - Awesome 2 - Sway/i3 3 - XFCE/DWM 3.5 - BSPWM/Openbox/Berry

[@thingsiplay]

Qtile is objectively the best tiling window manager... for Python people (me included!). I tried i3wm too as my first, but didn't like the manual aspect of it and couldn't make it automatic. And as a Rust fan too (I love Python and Rust) there is another not well known one: wtftw - it is written and configured in Rust, just what Qtile is for Python. If I wasn't this happy with Qtile, I would give it a shot.

[@zizouhuweidi]

@@thingsiplay I'm not a Pythonista or anything, but I use it for general programming sometimes. Given that it's a real programming language and it's fairly easy to script in, it gives Qtile a real advantage. I like Rust, but for my WM, it's probably not worth the trouble, the same way I don't wanna be coding C to use DWM. Personally I like the way BSPWM is setup, probably the best overall, but Qtile is my favourite in terms of window management and defaults. I like i3 for its simplicity, u can easily have a dynamic layout with autotiling, it's not as good and vast as Qtile layouts but it does the job. It's also very stable and widely available on all distros. i3 is a solid choice all round, but im yet to find a WM manager as comfortable as Qtile, Awesome WM is close, but configuring it can be a headache

[@thingsiplay]

@@zizouhuweidi I pretty much agree to 100% degree (I know "%" isn't a degree).

[@flatkat7781]

I actually use KDE Plasma, but with Bismuth installed, having something tiling window manager-like but still being kde and with being able to use some tiled windows with floatings at same time, that sometimes can be very useful.

[@isaacvicente]

This is the main reason I'm wondering switch from GNOME to KDE... 🤔

[@flatkat7781]

@@isaacvicente I dont like GNOME, but i challenged me to try it a bit and the autotiling extensions are not as good as bismuth. I liked the pop-os one, but it looks like i cant change the key bindings, and im already used to my actual key bindings. And you could test KDE with Bismuth on a VM or live usb for a bit to look if you like it.

[@dzurbagan4007]

I use XFCE as it has some tiling from the box. It is mostly enough for me, the only thing I would like to have maybe it is to launch some programms at certain places on screen instead of do it by hand (by manual tiling)

[@linuxdabbler]

Hi Matt. great video as usual. I enjoyed my time with i3 as well.

[@androth1502]

my favorites are gnome and a TLM. currently, that TLM is leftwm (i've also tried bspwm..another favorite, i3, herbs, awesome and qtile). my TLM workflow consists of several workspaces: 1: up to 2 open windows consisting of 2 terminals or 1 terminal and midnight commander. 2: maximized web browser 3: 0.6 web browser master split with 1-2 terminals or 1 terminal and vscode. (my reference and work workspace) 4: media workspace. video or music player, podcast, etc. ~:popup-terminal. leftwm kinda works here. though bspwm would be just as well imo. would another TLM be more suitable? i prefer "easy" ones. lol. work smarter, not harder.

[@ioneocla6577]

Imo leftwm is criminally underrated

[@riseabove3082]

I really like i3wm with gaps. I had it configured really nicely with Alacritty and Polybar with Rufus and it looked good. My other fav was BSPWM. I tried QTile and AwesomeWM and I don't remember if anything else. I never felt that same feeling as I did with i3wm. i3wm is fun to configure since it's just a script. AwesomeWM was too much to take in when I had so much other stuff going on. I don't use a TWM anymore because I got tired of configuring the TWM, then the polybar, then the terminal, then rufus, then polycom. It's just so much to configure and perfect. My biggest problem was always with polycom. That's 5 things you have to configure. At first I enjoyed it because I had the time to play around but not anymore. I love Gnome 42 and KDE Plasma. Today, I'm on the latest Plasma and pretty much love it. I even removed all the borders on my terminal in Plasma because why not. One thing, I like about a DE is I can have movable windows and the terminal I can sit it in one spot and have multiple tabs and not have to bob my head around the screen. Only the terminal and a text editor are forgiving in a box but everything else hates the confinement so I got tired of bothering with all that and let them be free. I still use keybindings a lot on my DE so it works for me.

[@thingsiplay]

You can replace the window manager in KDE Plasma with a tiling window manager, in example i3wm. I did that before switching completely to a TWM. Then you have only the i3 config and Plasma itself. You literally replace Kwin. I love this is possible with Plasma.

[@Little-bird-told-me]

I can never go back to Gnome/Kde now that I have used tlm

[@thingsiplay]

@@Little-bird-told-me There are extensions or builtin functionality which do what TWM does. GNOME and KDE Plasma have such extensions. However they are no match to a real TWM. For that reason KDE Plasma allows to replace its window manager with a real tiling window manager, such as i3wm. It is the real deal without magic. However. In my experience this gets a bit flakey. You have to take care of both systems and configure them and look that nothing over shadow the other. Some compatibility issues and more complexity will be the result. That is the reason why I switched to TWM only. But I just wanted mention this, because KDE+TWM is a real thing. Even if I don't recommend it by personal experience.

[@Little-bird-told-me]

@@thingsiplay If you are KDE fan then you must be aware of _Bismuth_, I am sure. Bismuth was my first intro to a tiling WM. I am more a gnome person so i didn't explore it much. Btw TWM means *Tab Window Manager*, there no acronym for tiling window manager :(

[@thingsiplay]

@@Little-bird-told-me I wouldn't say I am KDE fan. I switched to it the first time almost 2 years ago after using everything default on Ubuntu since 2008. But I use Qtile now and run a few KDE services and programs alongside like Dolphin, but not the entire Plasma desktop. And I settled down on it pretty much. And Python is one of the biggest reasons to use Qtile to me. When I was on Ubuntu with GNOME, my first experience was Regalith, based on i3wm. Then I switched to KDE and used an addon Krohnkite, then I switched to replacing KDE window manager to i3wm, then I switched entirely to Qtile. And sorry to disappoint you, but I am not aware of Bismuth. :D I will just look it up what it is about, just out of curiousity. But that is no longer needed anyway. (Edit: Okay I looked it up and immadiately see it is relatively new project. Which was probably not a thing when I used KDE. That's why it slipped through.)

[@ArniesTech]

After trying tiling WMs I came to the conclusion that I am a floating WM guy who wants the option to manually tile the windows as needed 💪😌

[@armeli]

It's funny that the first thing coming to my mind from your comment is "what a brave thing to say". Like tiling wm's would be inherently better or something. :D

[@ArniesTech]

@@armeli you wont believe how many religious wars are fought daily over the most minute things in the Linux world about what is superior or inferior. 🤣

[@sysandy2]

I like both actually, but really love using tiling window managers. I sometimes will dedicate a workspace to use as a place to store floating windows.

[@wyfyj]

lol he didnt want that emacs smoke! All jokes aside another good video.

[@SkyyySi]

I personally love awesome. I've used both i3 and awesome for about a year now, and I'm not switching back to i3. Awesome has the sanest defaults I've seen in a window manager, has both excellent floating *and* tiling support and has an infinitely customizable Lua API. It also has other nice features like tags, which are like workspaces but better. It's documentation definitely isn't nearly as good as i3's, but that's mainly because awesome's docs are API documentation while i3's docs are more like a guide. But this only means that the learning curve can be higher (particularly if you've never used Lua before), but after that, configuring more specific things can often be easier, since you have one language and API that can access and control everything the WM could possibly do, instead of having to combine scripts and programs written in five different languages.

[@Little-bird-told-me]

I was thinking choosing one of them, this clears it a lot. thanks

[@Little-bird-told-me]

After having used awesome for a while, I can say it's not very user friendly. You can't even find doc to configure the volume button. Lua is not something I want to invest my precious time into

[@itildude]

Qtile guy here. I just like the setup compared to others.

[@AnalyticMinded]

Here's my take about auto vs manual tilers. If your screen real-estate is small (say on a laptop), you really can't have that many open windows in a single worskpace, as the text gets squeezed in. (Does anyone really use a Fibonnaci layout with 5 windows open?) But you also don't want to have many workspaces to compensate for this, as then you are guessing which windows are on which workspaces (then it's kinda like searching through alt+tab in a full DE, which defeats the purpose of using a wm). For me, a good layout for serious work is two containers: one terminal on the left, and a container with tabs on the right. This, afaik, is not possible with auto tilers. Sometimes I want the master to consist of tabbed terminals, and again this requires a manual tiler. To anyone who's interested, search for the (defunct?) YT channel "budlabs" for some ideas on what you can do with i3. Also, the i3 "restore layout" functionality is a god-send! :D

[@codychan4992]

I've been using i3 for about 6 months, at the beginning I tried other popular wms except dwm and chose i3 at the end, recently l've spent over 20 hours configurating dwm(using dwm-flexipatch), quitted and deleted all configs l've done once in the middle, now I love i3 even more (i3 + i3status-rust)

[@DarthDweeb]

I use Pop!_OS. I love how they implemented the tiling into the dynamic work spaces of Gnome. I find that the pop shell does a wonderful job of splitting the difference of a tiling window manager and traditional desktop. And I cannot live without the dynamic work spaces that gnome brings.

[@wyfyj]

I use Pop OS as my daily driver. I can't wait for Cosmic to release. I have another hard drive for an Arch based distro. I find the more I putz around on Arch the more I learn about Linux and in turn Pop. They really are a hard working crew!

[@taidee]

On tiling window managers I started with Xmonad and like you didn't stay long there, I mainly didn't like the sequence of how the windows spawn and so after I couldn't find a way to reverse the spawning. I just didn't want to spend extra time learning haskell so quickly moved on to i3wm and stayed there happily for a while while playing around with other tiling window managers on Arcolinux and I settled on Qtile and moved out of Arco straight into vanilla Arch/Qtile and have been on that since, it's been over 2 years now.

[@giulianofrancopalazzi1104]

Hi, great video!! You should definitely give the other budlabs scripts a try. I think if you set it up the whole way with all of the scripts you will end up liking i3 even more!!!

[@TheLinuxCast]

Most of his were updated not to work with i3 gaps, which is what I use. I was really disappointed when i3-run would no longer work because i3 was a hard dependency.

[@ironmanlifts]

Xmonad, does everything and more. Thanks for the videos. I've been trying to use DWM to get away from all the haskell bloat but even after 10 patches DWM is more like 80% close to my xmonad config lol. I don't think it has tabs, I think I have to use tabbed. Haven't figured out how to sync tags across monitors been using the flexipatch and the sync don't work. There's a lot of issues I have to fix in dwm. I3, haven't given it an honest shot.... I give up on it easily. Emacs bloat LMAO !

[@gimcrack555]

My go to for using i3 has always been the stacking and tabbed features.

[@sotecluxan4221]

What is the best read and watch, when not having an inkling about wm's?

[@parker7721]

I love i3 but recently I made the change to Sway and it feels pretty much the same as i3 with the only difference that Sway has proper fractional scalling

[@bosmanka]

Do you use i3 or i3-gaps? I ask because I see no headers on your programs. I dislike the headers that i3 has as default.

[@TheLinuxCast]

I3 gaps. I remove the headers from everything.

[@RetroSmoo]

It's my favourite currently also. ☺️

I was expecting to see your new rice on i3wm... Maybe next time :-)

[@peppe540]

For me it's dk since a month. Before that bspwm. Sway also, but then from ArchLabs, which is amazing. And that means that I3 is still on the to do list ;-)

[@Bruces-Eclectic-World]

I use SpectrWm and LeftWm back and forth... Lol I have Hypr and I3 on my list and like you it is a List... If memory serve's TerminalForLife was last using I3 when he yank YT out by the balls. Speaking of TerminalForLife, has anyone heard from him? I hope he is doing good... Thanks Matt for the video! LLAP 🖖

[@gimcrack555]

My top 3 tiling window managers are i3, bspwm and herbstluftwm

[@studiokadaver]

I’m with you i3wm for the win

[@huljaxful]

I guess it's like with Linux mint... newbie linux but it offers stability etc. Love the cinnamon desktop.

[@Soliprem]

Finally, the "bara are bloat" movement gets recognition! We shall be heard!

[@soumyadeepghosh4197]

Can u make a tutorial on ricing bspwm in fedora? Like from the beginning to the end :))

[@smeueg]

AwesomeWM all the way!

[@thingsiplay]

I don't understand why people think something good for new users or beginners wouldn't be good for experienced users, like Ubuntu. But I never saw anyone (besides you in this video) saying this about i3wm at all. A program that makes it easy to get into and have familiar structures is a plus and not minus in my books.

[@fetymbzd]

thank you , just good

[@Wrynard]

i use gnome 42 with the pop shell extension enabled, there is a tiling mode to help organize your windows, it's pretty cool i also used bspwm for a while but then wifi broke and i had to install another DE to make wifi work again

[@opalmay]

Tiling window managers don't take care of anything else other than tiling windows (sometimes they include a bar and a keyboard daemon but that's about it) So to get your wifi working you need to set it up yourself, regardless of tiling wm. In my experience, easiest way is launching nm-applet --indicator in your config, which then will also add a tray icon for managing wifi. Super easy. Also check out pasystray for volume management and bluman-applet for Bluetooth

[@johndescy7904]

Emacs was a great choice. ^^

[@opalmay]

bspwm is very similar to i3 but way more hackable and I just love it

[@MENTOKz]

ratpoison wm is my fav or GOAT for me :D

[@thennoth2860]

use whatever works for your workflow and you enjoy using, that's the number one thing I think. if you're not enjoying using it, don't use it, even if people are saying you should or that what you actually want to use is inferior.

[@denisbaev5479]

Cinnamon on Linux Mint is so clean, I'm scared to switch.

[@0x7f2c]

to me, it does not make sense that i3 is your favorite when you have tried bspwm and dwm

[@TheLinuxCast]

Makes perfect sense to me

[@oalfodr]

I'll never understand people complaining about patching and compiling suckless programs being tedious. That is done only once in a long while. I would understand if it was something hard, but it only takes a minute or two to apply a patch

[@rsmith31416]

Some people keep messing with their WM, so I assume that's when it becomes tedious. As you said, for most users, it is only done once.

[@fineman1064]

why don't you use sway?

[@ikarm]

I've tried i3 and qTile. I like them, but because I do a lot of development with Java IDE's, tiling window managers are not the best choice for me. I always seem to go back to Openbox, with the keyboard shortcuts programmed according to i3.

[@madthumbs1564]

Tdrop is easier to setup than master-stack in i3 and it is wm agnostic for scratch pads. Master-stack in i3 was buggy when I used it (not sure they fixed it). Afaics the best is usually the one you stick with and figure out solutions for. I haven't patched dwm since the day I installed it, nor do I understand the claim it needs patching all the time. Similarly Qutebrowser had solutions like a greasemonkey script from tampermonkey and keynav.

[@halamadrid5238]

I have used Linux for ~10 months and I used i3 for the first 7 months and then DWM the last 3 months. DWM is so good I will never go back to i3

[@WildVoltorb]

Please elaborate

[@rsmith31416]

@@WildVoltorb I have the same experience. The default layouts in i3 weren't very useful to me. I used to run bspwm, but there are issues (visual glitches, weird behavior with electron apps) that are not getting fixed anytime soon, so I finally found that dwm doesn't have those issues and works flawlessly in my machines.

[@halamadrid5238]

@@WildVoltorb okay there are various reasons: 1. I like dynamic tiling more than manual tiling, it just fits me better. I dont want to have to think about where my windows will go next, and I find that the master and stack layout fits me perfectly. I also like the fact that the windows are ordered so I can use super+j,k to cycle between them, I dont have to think of which position they are in relation to eachother. 2. I like the patching. DWM is very minimal by default and I can make it my own by patching the things that I need into my personal build of DWM. And my build of DWM can be the same forever, because it's literally a folder of source files and it will never change if I dont want it to change. Yes there may be updates to the master branch of DWM (happens very rarely), but I dont have to merge those changes into my build if I dont want to. This makes it very stable and very unlikely to break. 3. I am a computer science student and I am gonna be learning C in the courses after the summer so thats another reason as to why I switched to DWM. I like the fact that I can tinker with the source code and learn C while doing it But everything is subjective of course, I am not saying DWM is objectively better to i3, these are just the reasons why I like it more

[@ricardosteijn4693]

Sway > i3

[@Cuperino]

I always install i3 first, just to get a working configuration and then move over to Sway because of Wayland, which prevents screen tearing in some of my systems.

[@andibensisva2155]

Does anyone know what is the equivalent key for switch place between two windows (SUPER+SPACE in dwm) in i3?

[@TheLinuxCast]

Super plus shift plus vim keys move the windows around. Note that the default config uses jkl semicolon. So if you haven't changed that it'll be slightly different for you

[@andibensisva2155]

@@TheLinuxCast I mean to quickly toggling/switch place between just two windows simultaneously/juxtapositionely. Not moving/rotating it. It's super+space in dwm. Thank you for the answer.

[@andibensisva2155]

OMG. I am sorry. I mean SUPER+RETURN (Meta+Enter) in dwm.

[@nonetrix3066]

I3bar is decent wish someone would take i3bar and DWM bar out of their respective window managers and make them their separate programs so I could use them else where

[@MrNeilypops]

#1 dwm...but yeh i3 is cool.

[@Auguste86]

bspwm & awesome are the best. I used to use Bismuth with KDE

[@jeh5150]

For my needs I have yet to get in a situation where i3 can’t do what I want. And then if it’s easy to configure on top of that seems like an obvious choice

[@sunriseleatherco.6587]

you should create your own WM ... just the way you like it. Call it maybe ... TLCWM? :))

[@xwinglover]

i3, I agree.

[@Федор2236]

My favorite window manager is BSPWM. I don't like i3 and sway because we install a tiling window manager to do as little window management as possible. Each time pointing the window to where it should appear is masochistic for me.

[@WildVoltorb]

Sure, but what if sometimes you WANT that feature? with i3/sway at least you can. It's more flexible than a manual tiling

[@Федор2236]

@@WildVoltorb If I want, then I can do it, BSPWM has this function.

[@homfes]

I couldn't stand i3 when I tried it but I don't hate it the same way I do Gnome. I don't see it as something only noobs would use nor do I dislike the philosophy behind the project. I just don't like the manual tiling behavior in its natural state. I'm aware that there's a way to turn it into a dynamic tiler but I'd rather just use a WM that does that out of the box.

[@tylerdean980]

DWM>i3

[@chrismcdonaldracing]

I use lxqt but I replaced openbox with i3wm

[@henninb]

Xmonad all the way

[@rarminqorset3628]

I am team openbox

[@ArniesTech]

That would be definitely my choice too if I had to go WM-only 💪😌

[@elmariachi5133]

Preferring xfwm xD All that experimental stuff doesn't do it for me.

[@nevoyu]

I've been using i3 more lately (well actually sway) but I can safely say is that I kinda just don't like it.

[@JakeLinux]

Sorry, xmonad and herbstluftwm are the way to go.

[@philiptharris]

i3

[@MichaelWilliams-lr4mb]

All software is bloat. It's best to have no software on the computer.

[@johanb.7869]

I know almost nothing about Linux, but I know enough to use it. WM's are just not my thing. I hate keyboard shortcuts. Mouse is so much easier. One click and voila.