I've noticed when going back to Mint/Cinnamon that even though the terminal is only a click/keypress away, I think about it differently because it feels heavier and slower, the window chrome makes it feel more 'desktoppy' and if I want to summon a bunch of them to do a few different things (or one thing with a few different strands) I'll need to put in some cognitive effort to rearrange them how I like them. It's a bit of an immersion breaker.
I run i3 inside Mate (gnome 2 fork). The features I use most are switching between tiled and "tabbed", where you have fullscreen windows that can be navigated between like tabs quickly. I can pull up a browser and terminal or editor side by side, then switch to fullscreen terminal/editor, then back, very quickly.
i3 works in sort of a tree structure, so you can, say, split the root window level into two horizontal frames, then split the left one into three vertical ones, and the right one into three internal horizontal ones (if that's what you want).
I suspect I use the mouse more than most tilers, but I find <mod+Right Click> to resize while the windows stay tiled is quick enough and very accurate.
For me, the killer feature of i3wm is not how it lets me arrange windows on my screen, but how it lets me switch between them. With OSX, I have to maintain a mental stack of recently-used applications: If I'm in my terminal and I want to get to firefox, I have to hit cmd-tab, or maybe cmd-tab-tab, or maybe cmd-tab-tab-tab. At least once a day, I make an off-by-one error and get stuck in a context-shift loop until I pause, think, and do the needful. With i3wm, I have 10 workspaces, and each is available with a single chord press. I have my own conventions about what's where, and there's no cognitive load associated with switching between text editor and documentation, or whatever.
Along the same lines, I like to keep a roguelike open for quick breaks, but ideally I'd never accidentally switch to a video game. OSX gives you no ability to punt an application from your cmd-tab list except to quit the application. With i3wm, I keep that on workspace 0, and have never accidentally switched over to it.
You may think I'm being precious, but it really does make a huge difference in my ability to stay in the zone.
I saw something in the i3 docs about this feature, but it didn't work on the first try and I didn't dig deeper.
'assign' allows you make so if window opens, it opens on given screen Lower, you can see me switch to given workspace before autostarting apps.
assign [class="Firefox] 3 assign [class="Slack"] 4
But it doesn't work for me
Then I got addicted to the speed of flipping between windows and not having to fiddle with layout. Now I only have one screen but it is always the first install on a new Linux.
Nice small and configurable window dressing and i3bar were very nice also.
Once you got used to it, you notice other things like the speed and configurability.
But tbh I do think it only makes sense if you do a lot in the terminal, and need to switch often between applications.
Yes.
> Is it keyboard shortcut efficiencies?
Yes.
> Is it just cool?
That too :)
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Tiling window managers give lots of possibilities for very efficient screen usage: here's my IDE, my terminal, my browser, and my other browser all easily arranged in a nice way.
Plus, i3 also gives you composable stacked and tabbed layouts, for even more flexibilty.