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Comment by DocTomoe | Hacker News Reader

I'm using i3. I still keep Gnome around, because from time to time I need to hold presentations, and randomly appearing and disappearing monitors (=beamers) is not something i3 deals with gracefully.

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I use i3 on my laptop, where I routinely connect and disconnect external displays. I wrote a small program to deal with that: http://github.com/mortie/dedaemon

That tool also handles input stuff (like setting the keyboard layout when a keyboard is connected, or setting the mouse speed when a mouse is connected), and setting the wallpaper (because the wallpaper has to be re-applied when a display is connected). Here's the config file I personally use: https://github.com/mortie/nixConf/blob/master/.dedaemon.hcnf

If you do end up trying it out, feel free to pm me (mort@irc.freenode.net) or open a github issue if you have any questions or problems.

Where has this been all my life?

So far I've been making do with shellscripts I call ad-hoc, but dedaemon looks super convenient.

Thanks for creating it, I'll certainly give it a try!

I use i3, and when I plug in a monitor, I just figured out the command i need with xrandr and save it as an alias or command.

Or I also found out accidentally, I had to install gnome for some stupid test. But, using gdm as the login manager made automatic monitor detection work under i3? I literally changed nothing. But using gdm to login to my i3 and it works flawlessly. Even turning off monitors moved everything to one automatically.

I've been using i3 for years now. For the past few weeks I've been using KDE with i3 as the WM instead of kwin. This mashup is pretty sweet.

E.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/64mihc/i3_kde_pla...

(Dis)connecting extra monitors has been automagic without any scripting/xrandr/3rd-party programs. KDE can handle that perfectly, and i3 obeys, so far.

It's pretty neat. And I say this as an i3 lover, not a KDE lover.

Can you be more specific about “not handling it gracefully”? i3 is purely reactive to changes in your monitor configuration. As long as you use xrandr (or arandr, or https://github.com/fd0/grobi, or…) to enable/disable monitors, i3 should move your workspaces around or create workspaces as needed.

I started with i3 but moved to bspwm. There is not much difference between the two and it is all about configuration and what is easier to setup. Multiple monitors is something that is always a problem in my experience. It is great that gnome deals properly with this issue for you.

Oh sweet. I was an xmonad user for years and just recently switched to bspwm. Defining the entire control interface on a socket feels very much in the aesthetic of Plan 9---expose control that interops well with coreutils and friends. My preferred browser, uzbl[1], does very much the same.

Switching from xmonad did also get me to switch from xmobar to lemonbar. I really like how lemonbar is again "just a pipe," though it did pull me down a bit of a configuration rabbit hole. I now have about 500 lines of shell that asyncronously show various bits of system and bspm state.

Anyway, I don't have much of a point, other than sharing my enthusiasm with a fellow user.

[1]: https://uzbl.org

uzbl looks interesting. Thanks for sharing

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