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I think an even better approach is to tell MATE to use i3 as its window manager. It's totally seamless and works perfectly.

Here is a blog post I wrote on how to do it: https://www.mattgreer.org/articles/mate-and-i3/

I also created a MATE panel applet so you don't need to have an i3bar.

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I did what your article explained on Ubuntu 18.04 and fresh working mate (i3 also worked fine when I booted into it). At first, it looked good - it looked like MATE but the Windows were opening in a WM way! But then I pressed the Super key and it broke - it opened it as a whole new application but one that doesn't work - I couldn't search on click on the broken menu.

Maybe it works if you remove and replace a bunch of settings and applets and whatever? I don't know but given that the second thing I did was already broken I didn't invest more time.

Ubuntu 18.04. Would not recommend to those thinking it will just work as expected.

Interesting. I wrote the article a long time ago, but I still use the approach it describes to this day. I have this setup on Ubuntu MATE 18.04 without issue, running MATE 1.20.1.

When you say super key, do you mean the windows key? And hitting it opens up the main MATE menu? For me, it opens up as expected: https://i.imgur.com/dZzQt1t.png and choosing an item from it does the expected thing.

For the i3 mod key I use alt. Is it possible you have both MATE and i3 set to the same super/mod key?

Thanks, I used your article with MATE 19.10 and it worked nicely. I didn't try your applet but instead heavily customised the i3wm and i3bar configs to my liking, wouldn't go back to a non tiling window manager now.

I love tiling WMs but I do have one gripe (and it's not the fault of the WMs): Every "about" window for every program should have the name of the binary in it so we can call it from the command line. Text editor? You have to know it's gedit. Document Viewer? Evince (say, what?) Want to use a gui for file management on a one-off basis (it happens)? Nautilus wait Nemo no that's not it shit fire up firefox and DDG...

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