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Comment by mherrmann | Hacker News Reader

I've been using i3 for a few months and can never see myself going back to working without it now. I must say that I think it makes most sense when you have multiple monitors though.

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I used i3 for a while and really enjoyed it. Though, I eventually switched back to KDE. I didn't like having to fiddle with power management and configuring screen locking.

I was noticing that I was only using 1-2 tiles at a time and I could easily emulate that by just side-by-siding windows in KDE.

I think if I ever have the chance to use a Linux machine professionally, especially with multiple monitors, I'll definitely reach for i3 again.

i3 couples with desktop environments rather nicely. I've used it with KDE and MATE, and others have used it successfully with XFCE.

My success with it with KDE was a little mixed, but I also didn't make any effort to resolve the little issues. With MATE though, it works flawlessly with no downsides or really any config needed. It's fantastic.

Here is how I set it up with MATE: https://www.mattgreer.org/articles/mate-and-i3/

I also run i3 and MATE. It's a great combo: powerful tiling window manager plus a DE that handles all the settings / control panel well (without me having to do much configuration myself!).

This looks really cool, thanks for sharing!

Cheers for the MATE panel applet you put together (that's in the blog post): https://github.com/city41/mate-i3-applet

Also, got any pictures of the desktop?

I found i3 the most useful at two extremes, my 12.5" (1080p) Thinkpad screen and my 43" 4K screen. Both benefit immensely from the tiling and virtual desktop arrangement and especially on the smaller screen the scratchpad.

Yes setup is fiddly at first but on my daily driver I haven't touched the config file in months.

> I could easily emulate that by just side-by-siding windows in KDE.

I'm now on i3 (actually Sway), but when I was still using KDE Plasma, I extensively used the "quick tile" global shortcuts for KWin. They're not all bound by default, but you can set them up in System Settings (Global Shortcuts > KWin). I had it set up so that Win+S maximizes the current window (which by itself is quirky), and then every key around S is for a quick tile. For example, Win+Q moves the current window to the upper left quadrant. Win+D has the window occupy the right half of the screen, and so forth.

The only thing that I do miss from KDE times is the full KDE Connect integration. I have kdeconnectd running through some clever trickery, and the sshfs and MPRIS integrations work fine, but e.g. clipboard sharing doesn't work with Sway yet.

I think that i3wm is amazing for single-monitor development; it lets me switch workspaces as quickly as flicking my eyes over to another monitor.

Agree, I do not understand the need for more than one monitor as your eyes can only focus on one monitor at the same time anyway. It looks cool to have a bunch of monitors in front of you and of course eyes notice stuff going on in your peripheral vision as well but for that one could use some notifier daemon to get the same effect.

At least one use case is typing something in one workspace while looking at another. Incredibly useful when you need to edit config files or edit specific portions of text. Since you only need the parts of where you're "copying" from typing it out is usually much faster.

Sounds like a sub-optimal workflow tbh. Why not copy/paste in the first place and then edit?

Like anything else, it depends on your workflow and preferences. For those of us in Animation/VFX, it really helps having multiple monitors as we have a decent amount of windows to manage interactive graphs, timelines, viewports, outliners, render views at full resolution, reference, etc. Pixel real estate comes at a premium here, and flipping back and forth between workspaces is not efficient in this context. For some in this area a single 4K may suffice, but dual monitors of anything is usually better (for editorial and grading it's essentially a requirement as a dedicated reference monitor, with other departments like comp able to use as well).

I have no experience in this area, so I take your word for it. But is this not at least partly a limitation imposed by the tools you are using?

> But is this not at least partly a limitation imposed by the tools you are using?

Not particularly[0]. It's more about the workflow and representation of data needed to work. To change this would require fundamentally changing the way this work is done, which I'm not sure is possible to the degree where it would make sense.

All of the applications are capable of being used on a single monitor. Windows can be docked, tabbed, hidden, workspaces arranged and saved, etc. It's just that it's not as efficient to work on a single monitor as it'll require significantly more scrolling, panning, zooming in and out, and switching tabs/windows/applications than having another screen to offload and dedicate windows to with the provided real estate. Once you experience having multiple monitors for these kinds of workflows, it becomes a real bother only having access to one. It sounds superficial, but when that's what a large portion of the job entails every little bit helps.

Even when I had multiple monitors, I combined that with virtual desktops to great affect to help focus what each workspace was used for (one for main 3D, one for compositing, one for texturing, etc). They work really well together. If one wished to stick with a single monitor, then using an ultra-wide would be my best recommendation.

[0] There are some areas, where UI's and viewers are written with 8-bit support only, so a 10-bit secondary reference monitor to use with a dedicated output card is required when working with this kind of material 'properly' (accurately, correctly, without dithering, etc). Even when this isn't required, a second monitor is often used as a dedicated full screen viewer anyways so that an image is viewed at 1:1 in its entirety with no scaling artifacts introduced so the artist knows exactly how an image looks.

> your eyes can only focus on one monitor at the same time anyway

True, but peripheral vision is a thing. I have Slack and stuff on a separate monitor, so I can see from the corner of my eye if there are any unreads.

I agree, but as I said, you can have some notification daemon or tray icon to achieve the same.

I have a desktop with 3x monitors, and a laptop. And I find it's different but equally useful in both scenarios.

My desktop, i only use 1 workspace per monitor. and i3wm is there just for tiling across large monitors.

My laptop, I only have 1 monitor so I basically mimic a multi monitor setup with workspaces, but tile less since the screen is smaller.

Is there a way to force certain workspaces to always be on certain monitors?

If you switch workspaces on monitor A, whatever workspace you have on monitor B will not move.

So what you want is already supported. Just don't switch over to monitor B and switch it to a different workspace.

Yes https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#workspace_screen

Yes. On my system, for example, I like to pin odd-numbered workspaces to my left screen and even-numbered workspaces to my right screen:

  workspace $ws1 output DisplayPort-0
  workspace $ws2 output DisplayPort-1
  workspace $ws3 output DisplayPort-0
  workspace $ws4 output DisplayPort-1
  workspace $ws5 output DisplayPort-0
  workspace $ws6 output DisplayPort-1
  workspace $ws7 output DisplayPort-0
  workspace $ws8 output DisplayPort-1
  workspace $ws9 output DisplayPort-0
  workspace $ws10 output DisplayPort-1

You can have your cake and eat it to-

  set $monL DP-1.3
  set $monR DP-2
  
  set $ws1L "1L"
  set $ws2L "2L"
  ...
  set $ws1R "1R"
  set $ws2R "2R"
  ...

  workspace $ws1L output $monL
  workspace $ws1R output $monR
  workspace $ws2L output $monL
  workspace $ws2R output $monR
  ...

and upidate bindsyms (maybe add a modifier to switch right workspaces..?)

  bindsym $mod+1 workspace $ws1L
  bindsym $mod+2 workspace $ws2L
  ...

For me it makes sense on my single monitor as well. Couldn’t go back indeed. I still wonder why Windows is called Windows, but actually very bad at handling windows if you compare it to i3.

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