I3wm: an excellent and aesthetically pleasing window manager

I just posted this 1200+ word tutorial on setting up i3wm. Enjoy?!?!?

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Great article and I really like your writing style.

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That is a nicely-written article. I’ve probably tried most of the tiling window managers and the choice comes down to personal preference. I recently had another go at i3 and set up i3-gaps with bumblebee-status. I then changed bumblebee-status for i3status-rust which does virtually the same and can look equally neat with a little tweaking. I don’t see the need for conky with a good status bar, but otherwise my i3 setup would be similar to the writer’s. I admit that I like it. However, I also have to admit that I installed Awesome as an alternative WM and I tend to use that more. Naturally, Awesome needs to have some tweaking to get rid of some of the useless bits but I like the fact that it is a fork of DWM and includes some of the patches that make dwm so useful. All-in-all, I think Awesome is just a little more capable than i3 and its only major drawback is Lua which meant that I took a long time to work out how the configuarion file worked.

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@davidw I heartily agree. People should use what they like and works for them. As for my conky use, I wanted to play with conkybar and like what it provides. Additionally, because I use 2 Conkies on the desktop, there is little added overhead (at least I don’t see any). In the end the reasons boil down to added eye-candy & fun. I can think of no better reasons. :wink:

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I stay on the sway side…for the most part, the configs are completely portable from I3 (though there might be one or two exceptions)…and the tool syntax for the other pieces (like bars) does differ. I think I’d be at least equally comfortable with I3, except I have this dread of having to have X11 loaded and running to use it.
I like being able to just type ‘kde’,‘sway’,‘river’ at the command line and launch them. (versus a chooser)

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Dope and solid!

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