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Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

Change the shortcuts. You can even have mouse clicks be an event. https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/558

https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#keybindings

I find it funny that so many little paper cuts that can be fixed in less then 30 minutes makes people move in tiled window managers.

i3 greatest strength is its ease of configuration compared to most other twm.

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Speaking as a user of XMonad for a few years now, I think the way tiled window managers tend to present more as toolkits for assembling your own tiled window manager rather than one that's just ready-to-go for everyone is as much a disadvantage as it is an advantage. (Yes, they all have default configurations of course, but you are generally expected to customize.) When people occasionally ask me about it, I tend to advise people to pick their tiled window manager less on the putative features and more by what programming language that it is implemented in that they are comfortable in. Now, if you're fluent in one of the languages in question, that's awesome, but it does raise the bar for a lot of people.

You don't have to be an "expert" in Haskell to use XMonad, but it sure doesn't hurt if you want to do some heavier-duty customizations, like use modules that aren't even nominally a part of XMonad.

You seem to know XMonad well, so I'll ask a question. Does it support manual tiling and application tabs yet? I couldn't use it because it felt too basic to me last time I checked it.

I'm pretty sure the core XMonad doesn't, but the core XMonad doesn't do a lot of things, really. If you Google "xmonad tabs", I get http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Layout-T... I have no idea if it will do what you want because I've never used it. That's in xmonad-contrib.

I don't know what you mean by "manual tiling", so I can't say if it's supported. I know I do some manual things but most of my manual things are out of the tiling context entirely.

By manual tiling I mean not having a reduced hardcoded number of layouts, but being able to split every "container" horizontally and vertically, moving and resizing windows freely (ideally using mouse like ion3 did).

There is a BSP based layout[1] in xmonad-contrib. You can resize it using the mouse or the keyboard (with appropriate configuration).

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/xmonad-contrib-0.13/docs...

While i3 does not (AFAIK) support mouse resizing, it does everything else you've mentioned out of the box: split containers horizontally/vertically; supports stacked and tabbed layouts; and with a few config lines, resize both floatable and fixed (i.e. part of stack/tab group) containers.

Yes, I know, I tried it, it has some ideas that ion3 had before, but I still find it lot less flexible than ion3. Though in this case I was asking specifically about XMonad.

Fair enough, ion3 sounds quite interesting, unfortunate that development stopped.

As for XMonad, like Awesome WM, you can probably customize things however you see fit. Just need to know Haskell/Lua and the WM well enough to do so, which may be less than obvious for most.

There is a maintained fork called notion https://github.com/raboof/notion/

It's not heavily developed, but plenty stable. (actually I have a WIP PR open adding icon support)

ion3 (these days that means "notion") is probably the most scriptable WM ever. We're actually using it to implement a prototype of a new WM.

That is true. I was using it heavily when I was using Linux.

With i3 you don't need a language. The configuration is a simple text file. That is why i3 has been my Tiled Window Manger for 4 years now.

> Configuring i3

This is where the real fun begins ;-). Most things are very dependent on your ideal working environment so we can’t make reasonable defaults for them.

While not using a programming language for the configuration, i3 stays quite flexible in regards to the things you usually want your window manager to do.

http://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#configuring

A text file, yes, "simple", well, no, I wouldn't say so. It's not i3's fault; I'd say that comes pretty close to exposing the essential complexity without much accidental complexity. (Translating back out of architecture-astronaut-speak, that's pretty high praise.) But there's a lot of essential complexity. If I plot the complexity of a non-Haskell expert's .xmonad file, an i3 file, and just using stock Ubuntu Gnome, .xmonad and i3 end up pretty much next to each other from the perspective of the Gnome user.

That is a Strawman Argument. What person wants a tiled window manager and not customize it? They want a keyboard driven ui without the ability to change the defaults (Which are some of the best defaults ever)

It is like saying Notepad is simple and Visual Studio Code is complex because it has a plain text json file for customization. They are different tools. For the tool visual studio is much easier then say VIM.

So is i3 MUCH easier to configure then XMond and Awesome.

Nice to know.

Some visual alternative, like the Windows 8 start menu, to choose apps would be nice on a mouse button.

I like the command menu, when I'm programming, but often I just want to click some icons and be done with it.

you can run any app launcer. Launchy is on my system but 99% of the time I just use dmenu.

https://www.slant.co/topics/3945/~linux-app-launchers

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