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Comment by conradk | Hacker News Reader

I use i3wm and always feel left out of these kinds of tips, because i3wm uses Alt for all kinds of Window Management stuff. If I do Alt-F, my shell goes fullscreen, because i3wm is setup to do that.

Any tips for i3wm users that have these kinds of keybind conflicts ?

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I use Super instead of Alt. When I changed to i3 I instantly knew that alt would conflict with everything in terminals.

I use the windows key for the i3 modifier, and leave alt alone. If your keyboard doesn't have a windows key, you can probably map left-alt to mod and leave right-alt alone. Or vice versa.

Basically, find a redundant key to use as your wm mod key.

I don't use i3wm but I use XMonad. I set my (window manager) meta key to the "windows key". You can probably do the same thing. I can't live without alt-. in the shell!

I remapped my modifier to the <Super> (Mod4) key a long time ago. Although I also admit to not using the alt variants of this.

Alt is a common modifier for navigation though, things like qutebrowser use it to navigate tabs and such. It's worthwhile to switch and the "Windows" key hasn't conflicted with anything for me. In my opinion it's a saner default than the current.

I've rebound the modifier key to the Windows key (Mod4) from the default Alt (Mod1).

I'm not sure if it's an option in your setup, but this is why I use the "Windows" key on my keyboard as my i3 modifier. The Alt key then remains available for applications.

Yeah -- set your i3wm command modifier to Super (Windows key).

I've been using i3wm for years with zero conflict with Emacs itself, let alone the shell's Emacs-like keybindings.

Why don’t you use the windows key(Mod4) for i3?

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