[Tutorial] Easy Setup: Endeavour XFCE + i3 tiling window manager

No it’s working. The bar didn’t disappear at first. Maybe i didn’t log out and back in? But yes it’s working thanks! I’m just trying to get some more understanding of I3 and this helps. I still don’t know much about it. I’m not sure tiling is my thing yet? I still like Xfce, Cinnamon, Kde and Mate. This is great though and i appreciate the tutorial.

Edit: I should have made a backup of the original settings for the Bar so i could revert back?

When I commented out bar I got an error, although I don’t know why exactly. I think it’s very interesting that you did need to comment it out. I’ll look into it more. Maybe it’s easier to just remove the whole i3 bar config. I’ll update OP is if I find an easier way.

After you make an adjustment to the config it won’t take change until you log out and back in or reload the config which is meta+shift+r I believe.

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I just comment out the bar also and i get no errors. It’s actually better on my amdgpu as i was getting some artifacts when it logged in but not now.

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You could also flat out remove it. That whole bit in entirety is just the i3 bar.

Actually, it may even be easier to just pacman -R i3bar, although I would have to try it out to verify there’s no other issue. It may be a dependency for i3 though.

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It gives both functionalities as you have XFCE and the I3 tiling.

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It’s been one of, if not my favorite DE for a long time now.

I’m the end did you end up commenting out the line 3 with bar in it? Could you post up that section or maybe even a screen shot of yours. @manuel had to comment it out, I didn’t, I was wondering which one you were?

Great stuff. I can’t wait to get to the weekend to try it out. And it seems there are quit a few people happy about this tutorial.
Thank you for this.

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Thank you all for helping me find my bug here. @ricklinux You noticed the workspace switcher was uncommented so when both the line with the “bar” and "workspace switcher were uncommented, I didn’t throw an error, @manuel You probably have both of those lines commented out, and you also didn’t throw an error.

I have updated and edited my OP with a new photo and even more clear/concise instructions. Hash EVERYTHING in that i3 bar section, and we’re back in business. Bonus, it’s even easier to explain and for others to give this a spin and see if it’s something they might enjoy.

Thanks @BONK and @joekamprad and if there’s a few folks out there who enjoy this, then it was worth making! If nothing else, I think the “intermediate” nature of the folks here who DE hop a lot, this could be a fun project to try out and something a little more involved than just nuke and pave.

Hopefully others can replicate and enjoy a fun little side project, and a little different DE that I’ve been enjoying for a couple of years now!!

Edit: In honor of my favorite drunken selfish cartoon character ever. I’ve offically called this the “Bender DE.” I’ve also added a tips section at the bottom I will update as I find answers to questions - if any come up.

And since I know @nate you asked about running gimp/inkscape - no issues. Even if you don’t keep it around, I hope you enjoy giving it trial run.

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Ok now I’m sitting here wanting to try this lol. :thinking: :rofl:

Do it. Give me feedback. I’m trying to make this tutorial as concise as possible. It can’t be that hard - even I can do it. hahahaha But seriously, I would really like it to be simple enough that the average EOS user (intermediate, terminal centric Linux enthusiast) can follow along and get to a simple, calculated baseline installation with xfce+i3.

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Oh i know i can do it, your tutorial is very good. I like Plasma too, haha!

Thanks for the good advice. I would install on my test slaptop partition. Bare metal is best.
The last Endeavour iso was endeavouros-2021.02.03-x86_64.iso .
Not pestering … just wondering, this might be best tested after a new iso, since there would be fewer updates to break something???

great stuff.
one question: is it possible to only tile specific applications and open all others as floating windows?
Ideally I’d like to tile the windows currently on screen on command, and all the windows i open afterwards to be floating freely.

Hmm… interesting. I’ll try it someday on my other spare laptop. I’ll bookmark this. Thanks for the post.

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So I went ahead and did this last night. Followed the post and ended up with pretty much the exact same setup as the screen shots. I still need to make some tweaks here and there for personal preferences but it was fairly painless. I keep everything important on external media so nuking an install is no big deal. I’l come back later and leave some more notes.

One quick note…if nano scares people it is not a big deal even though we are a terminal-centric distro. Since i3 is installed we have xed as a text editor so you can just open thunar and CTRL+h the home directory and then open the config files in xed. Just a little more convenient as you can click to save etc as opposed to CTRL=O and CTRL+X in nano.

Also, you have rofi as an application menu as well so lots of options to launch a application.

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That’s the iso I used a couple of days ago. It should be no more or less fragile than any other install. When doing the online installer, everything should be up to date with the conclusion of installation.

Using the i3 documentation you can definitely config certain programs to open as floating windows. It would be more the other way, since i3 by default is a tiling window manager, you would need to make exceptions for floating applications instead of the other way around.

I don’t remember the keybinding off the top of my head (I’m using most of the bindings that came preconfigured from the EOS config still instead of my own config from years past).

For example, maybe you always want thunar to open floating, you can set that I’m the config. But everything by default will tile.

What you’re looking for to tile a work space on command and normally open as floating may better be served by adding the zentile package from the AUR to a regular XFCE install. That sounds more like that you’re looking for.

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The only ISO this would apply to would be an offline install. Online installs are net installs and automagically up to date. Then again this won’t work offline as the only de available is XFCE.

Any focused window can be floated by hitting MOD+SHIFT+SPACE

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There it is. And then you can hold meta+click with the mouse to move it, and at that point you can grab a corner to resize anything as you see necessary.

meta+f will toggle fullscreen on anything as well. All of these are customizable to your preferences as well. Just edit the i3 config for whatever works for you. I immediately switch my kill window to meta+shift+x - I have used it for years now. I even use it as a shortcut in Plasma and basically every install I do.

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One more thing I am looking into is the fact that the meta key gets reassigned by i3config so if you want a keybind for the wisker menu you will need to assign one.

I added this. You may find this helpful :slight_smile:

# keybinding whisker menu
bindsym $mod+shift+z exec xfce4-popup-whiskermenu

Screenshot_2021-03-31_04-21-25

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