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Comment by kovac | Hacker News Reader

Well, let me tell you how to do c++ programming with Vim. Get a Linux machine, replace the desktop with i3wm. Get a terminal emulator like urxvt and make it dark and semi transparent. Set a beautiful wallpaper. Install YouCompleteMe. Now you are in paradise :)

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This doesn't spot errors for you like a language server can. And you will make errors. Which you see after twenty minutes of buildtime. Much fun. Very productive. Personally I'm back to using ides again but I'm glad something remotely viable has been made available to vim.

> Personally I'm back to using ides again but I'm glad something remotely viable has been made available to vim.

I think you might be misinformed; I've been getting code-completion and error reporting through vim for at least 8 years on C++, and I don't know how much longer before that it's been available.

I mean, I have all that. i3-gaps, alacritty, conky for transparency, etc. But for a big C++ codebase you just end up being way more productive in something like CLion. The static analysis is way way way more in-depth than something like vim can provide even with plugins.

God how i3wm changed my life for the much, much better.

This may be considered blasphemy, but I continue to use i3-gaps on my 43" 4K monitor in 100% floating mode. It actually works quite well. Of course for my small displays I use tiling mode.

Does i3 allow you to easily toggle floating on each window (regardless of the main mode that new windows default to) like dwm?

Yes, shift-super-space is I think the default key binding to switch the current window.

That’s exactly what it is in dwm (except that dwm defaults to using alt as the MOD(ifier) instead of super, but changing that takes only a one line patch). And you can also just use MOD-leftmouse-drag to move a window or MOD-rightmousedrag to resize (either of which change the window to floating mode if it isn’t there already), or use MOD-middlemouseclick to toggle its floating state.

Why don't you use one of the olden and golden wm's for that? i3 doesn't have alt-tab

sure it does

    bindsym $mod+Tab exec --no-startup-id rofi -show window

Rofi is great, but it's still adding several extra keystrokes for something that alt-tab essentially does in 2 (alt, hold tab till you get to a window you want, release to go to it. on rofi, you'd have to press alt-tab to invoke the window dialog, then type a portion of window name or navigate down to it, then press enter) .

> (alt, hold tab till you get to a window you want, release to go to it.

madness :) I could never manage to get to my window like that, it's alt + tab tab tab tab tab tab tab until I get where I want when on windows vs alt + tab down down down down on rofi so I don't see a lot of difference

Haha, fair enough. Also turns out tab tab tab tab works on rofi -show window (my fault for not using it much hence not knowing) so maybe it's not all that different after all!

Imo if you're only floating, Openbox is even lighter than i3 and works great. Super configurable too- the config file is just XML. I really enjoyed my time on it but I like tiling too much. Window-snapping wasn't enough.

Ick.

I use xmonad, despite not knowing any Haskell. I basically just copy pasted little snippets from all over the place and changed random characters until it started working.

Pretty sure I still prefer this state of affairs to XML.

If you're only using the floating mode, I would recommend trying cwm.

Terminator is my window manager -> Ctrl-Shift-E / Ctrl-Shift-O .. (Ctrl-Shift-N / -P) ..

I still use terminator out of habit, but I never tile it anymore. Terminator can't tile my browser windows along with my terminal windows, and interleaving separate shortcuts (and window groups) defeats the purpose of tiling

Browser -> fullscreen. End of problem. Tabs in the browser window are the switch point.

Terminator isn't for everyone. But it can be for anyone.

I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying you always make the browser fullscreen? Tbh I think you might be missing the purpose of a tiling window manager

Oh sure, I get the point of tiling window managers .. its just that I rarely need to leave Terminator for anything besides the odd web document or so - and that context switch is, for me, quite helpful.

But I set up Terminator in full tiled rig for everything else, and rarely every leave it. Its a delight.

add an alias to bashconfig to just enter 'g' or 'g cprogram' to compile and run

add picom with dual kawase blur https://github.com/tryone144/picom/tree/feature/dual_kawase

add rofi

add zathura and some opacity to it via picom

I use i3wm.... I really never see my wallpaper. I'd have to go to floating mode to do so.

i3-gaps makes it a much better experience, in my opinion.

I love how i3-gaps, transparency etc. look but in the end I always turn them off again because it's just that little bit too distracting. But I have the choice, and that's cool.

I love me some drop shadows and a nice theme though.

How do you deal with i3wm for people who use large fonts? I use large fonts and I find that I do not have enough space in my editor to tile multiple editors.

If you haven't, you (op or readers) might try Awesome window manager. LUA based. GPL. It's i3 for us GNU-heads.

Agree with everything except the beautiful wallpaper:) That's my setup.

Only if it is a C++ programmer that writes boring POSIX CLI applications and daemons.

... instead of boring CRUD applications..

Those were already boring in mainframes before UNIX was invented.

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