I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

I used to be all in on Apple, using their iMac G4 and later on the Intel iMacs at home, but needed a beefier machine. So when I started in a new job, instead of getting a macBook, I asked the company IT to build me a workstation (and been asking for it from the companies I worked for after that). Installed Arch Linux and i3 to it, and never looked back. Did run Linux and i3 in the macs I owned for a while, until I built myself a home desktop and replaced my laptop with a ThinkPad, all running Arch Linux and either i3 or sway as a window manager.

This is the end game for me. Emacs, Alacritty and Firefox with a rolling release distribution. The same configuration with even the same wallpaper for the past 10 years that follows me from Gitlab.

Thanks, i3 and sway!

I will never, ever forgive Apple for removing two-dimensional virtual desktops (I think they called it "spaces"). Then just to spite all of us, a few releases later they made it impossible for TotalSpaces (a hack that gave us back this functionality) to do the kernel code-injection wizardry that they sold for the incredible bargain price of $12 or something like that. Because, you know, "security".

That was the end of my Apple decade.

Now I use sway, which is an astonishingly-faithful (like, down to the config files) wayland clone of i3.

Curious what you mean by this? Which additional mechanism does Linux (or i3?) have for opening a text file between apps?

Is it easy to reconfigure keyboard shortcuts like cmd+C for Mac but ctrl+C on Linux? I have spent way too much time trying to do it on Ubuntu and it has made it hard for me to make the switch.

Change your keyboard layout to one of your own? Eh maybe Xmodmaps, oh but then it gets reset every so often because $HISTORICAL_ARTIFACT. You have to change the actual xkb mapping, which is very much not a “happy path” in any DE.

The only graphical e-mail client that actually seems feature complete is Thunderbird, and for _years_ I have to race to disable the global search within 10 seconds of starting it. Otherwise the program just freezes up. I don’t even know what to use for calendar stuff.

I would really love it if Linux was viable for me as a desktop OS. It just isn’t, because of things like these.

There are some tools (all $$) for Mac which attempt to replicate a tiling WM but Apple's support for it is extremely poor, affecting the quality of the tools.

Like you I used Magnet but wanting to get something more tiling window manager-like I switched to Amethyst[1] which while not as powerful is pretty good for what it is.

Sadly macOS has frustratingly laggy window resizing for a lot of things. Finder and Safari are usually fine but pretty much everything else feels laggy to resize and generally macOS just has absolutely terrible window manager so a tiling window manager is a god send.

I mostly use macOS because I have been doing iOS and macOS development and so what else you gonna use but I have to admit I want to move away from the platform. It is all 'very exciting' right now with all the Apple Silicon hype and yeah it genuinely is impressive but for me I kinda want to get back to something more open even if it doesn't have a lovely highly efficient and performant custom SoC driving it.

I am like 90% there in convincing myself to build a nice AMD desktop next year and moving away from macOS as my main OS. Luckily I am not dependent on any Apple services so switching shouldn't be that bad.

[1] https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

Take away a lot of the chrome and it’s incredible how much can be achieved via simple text files and unfussy Linux tools.

As an example, my GTD workflow (before I switched to a physical bullet journal) went from a variety of apps to a single i3 workspace that auto opened with 5 terms with each containing a single markdown file opened in vim.

The leftmost column contained the processing file from top to bottom. The middle column had Doing and Follow up files.

The rightmost column had Done and Projects files.

My done would be archived each week with a script and a new done file opened for the upcoming week.

If there were any other major files I wanted (for example I would maintain a ling term projects file) that would be opened in a different buffer in the VIM app containing the projects file.

Moving items from one folder to another was as simple as quickly navigating to that folder, using a shortcut to yank or cut the line to the global clipboard, ans then pasting it to the file I wanted to move it to.

I suspect it would have been trivial to write a script that would have automatically moved the entire line over with a single shortcut.

There is absolutely no additional overhead and it works extremely fast and well.

It took me about 2 weeks to get kind-of used to the different modifier keys, but it did not feel the same.

But the thing that made me switch back is when I was buying a laptop. I was set on not going with Apple anymore after my previous macbook screen died 2.5 years in and they were asking almost 1000€ to fix it. But I could not find an option that would match the 16" macbook laptop. I was considering the build quality, screen size and its resolution, battery life, usb type-c charger, trackpad experience and the overall software support that I will expect from a daily driver to do my web development work. I was seriously considering the dell xps 15 9500 that launched this year, but I saw a lot of feedback about generally poor battery life on linux and some cases of trackpad problems.

I was thinking about getting a second, cheaper device like System76 Pangolin and see how it works and use this as a transition to a different platform instead of going all in by immediately switching the daily driver.

To further illustrate: I primarily have an open Terminal+Tmux for editing on my main monitor. On my side, i have spacial but overlapping windows. They stick out a bit, such that it's primarily four tabs - left,up,right,down. For example my Slack is on the left tab, and i can always see my contact list, people typing to me, etc. My Browser is usually on the Up tab, as it allows me to see the browsers tabs themselves. I do the same with Zoom on the bottom, such that my Mic (mute/unmute) is always visible. And etc.

This arrangement perhaps isn't ideal, but it's better than a tile for me because in a tile, i lose so much real-estate that the window becomes near useless. I can't shrink Slack to 1/4 of my Monitor, it's got too many boarders/etc. Same goes for my Browser, most sites have non-collapsing sidebars and etc, a tiny 1/4 window is useless.

This method of spacial layout obscures ~90% of my windows but leaves some of it always visible. In some cases that's very useful. But this is something i manage through the day, and a WM to automate this positioning would be amazing.

> - scratchpad [1]: Little known i3 feature. Let's you put individual windows in a scratch workspace and then pull them up quickly over your regular workspaces. Really useful docs and things like that, I keep my time tracker in a scratch workspace.

Ah, this is nice. I used to use a similar feature with ion before I switched to i3 but I didn't realize that i3 had the same functionality built in.

If you wanna have a rofi-like interface (with it showing rows of results) you could use -l [lines] to show dmenu in vertical rows rather than in one row with many entries.

Just a PSA; your use case is very well suited to rofi and if I had that workflow I'd have a hard time translating that to dmenu.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E8sUNHdzG8

[1]: https://github.com/devenblake/dotfiles/blob/main/src/dmenu/c...

Workflow:

1. Arrange your windows how you like

2. Save the layout

3. Open the windows

4. Load the layout

Repeat 3 and 4.

Nicely done with rofi/dmenu.

Note, this is totally doable in dmenu. I have a script that combines output from wmctrl and dmenu_path. This is bound to M-space for me.

If you have a script or binary that outputs a list of newline-separated strings, you can easily combine these, and dmenu will happily return the selected thing.

Here's what that looks like:

    present-options () {
        windows      # Function to list open windows
        dmenu_path   # dmenu script listing binaries
    }

I haven't tried to set it up in a while, I'm sure you could get the same setup running with sway under wayland with some effort.

If you use your computer once a week to check your emails I understand that it's just a waste of time. If you do more, long-term investments such as these might be worth it.

Now I agree that a more integrated experience out of the box would make the learning curve more gentle. Some have mentioned Regolith, it looks like it would be better for you than plain i3 (I haven't tried it personally so I can't judge): https://regolith-linux.org/

I use multi-displays too (XMonad; I assume i3 has the same!).

I use more complex splits occasionally for dev work I quite like it but I guess I could use something more conventional if it were keyboard-friendly.

or

https://regolith-linux.org/

regolith works only under ubuntu though but both should work under gnome.

You can easily run the Gnome or XFCE settings daemon without launching a session of their window manager.

Edit: it is also lightweight, with proper power management (think TLP/Powertop) you can vastly improve your battery life.

As I get old, I started to look more toward simple Windows managers, like OpenBox. I really do like having the buttons, and a window border I can actually hit with my pointer.

Personally I think it would be fun if someone cloned Windows 3.11 and added a few ekstra keyboard shortcuts.

That's not true, i often just use the tab-mode.

Using tiling for a long time, i go berserk having to rearrange window's with the mouse, then one is over the other...etc, it a mess!

Switched to i3 on a nixos box a few months ago - never leaving the tiling vm, or nixos for that matter.

I suddenly use workspaces which I never used to and I have coms in one space (mail/slack/teams), terms with vim etc in one, and web browser in a third.

Never looking around for windows and draging stuff around is magical for the workflow.

With fzf and a launcher & window switcher my workflow have never been more streamlined.

Nixos helps as well, but that’s a different topic. :)

When I'm on a Windows machine I spend so much time alt tabbing and dragging and resizing, I didn't notice it until I started using i3 on my linux machine. Five workspaces, bound to Alt 1-5, fully using the screenspace, I can almost not stand working without it any more.

A tiling WM not only enforces this (although it can switch to floating if needed), it handles positioning automatically so I don't need to fidget with positioning and sizing of multiple windows. It also minimizes useless fluff to make it easy to have even more windows operated in parallel.

Windows, macOS, GNOME and others do various degrees of tiling as a sign of the usefulness. Even fullscreen is just a special case of tiling with 1 window.

If you're a kind of person that always fullscreen things, you'll enjoy a tiling WM.

(I don't understand people that work with small floating windows. It's a waste of limited screen real estate, and means you don't get to see as much of what you're working on as you could. Suboptimal.)

Where dynamic WMs constantly rearrange all the windows with every change according to some fixed layout, the static ones work basically like Vim's windows and buffers. Meaning windows are stacked above each other by default with only the first one showing, but with some shortcuts you can split horizontally or vertically and change all split dimensions.

I have used many tiling window managers and over time I gravitated away from all the dynamic WMs because they're just not flexible enough for the real world. They tend to work on the assumption that the user needs all windows on the screen all the time, and this does not make sense in many scenarios.

It recognizes apps that I have open and I wrote an algorithm to place them on the screen the way I want.

It also creates what I call scenes, which allows me to select from couple different dynamic arrangements of windows depending on what I work on.

I can also able to instantly decide what windows are on both monitors by having a simple script when I select a desktop and it is being brought to primary monitor and contents of primary monitor is pushed to secondary monitor. By pressing two key shortcuts in short succession I can almost instantly set any arbitrary windows on both monitors without moving my mouse.

Now, this would be difficult to organize on another WM, but is a breeze on i3.

It works great both on a single laptop, and with 3 external monitors (of which one generally has a single workspace hardcoded). I fully utilize all 9/10 workspaces most days.

The only time it doesn't fit great is with e.g. GIMP that has several small windows for toolboxes and stuff - one can still target particular windows to be floating (either keybind at runtime or with static config targeting window names/classes/whatnot).

There's no way I'm switching away from Xmonad for my main workstation - but you do you!

These are manual tiling wms. So in exwm I can chose how to position and resize my windows any way I want. For example I can hit C-x 3 to split my screen in half vertically then C-x 2 to split one of the vertical splits horizontally. Now I have

  +----------+-----------+
  |          |           |
  |          |           |
  |          +-----------+
  |          |           |
  |          |           |
  +----------+-----------+

It seems to me like that covers 99% of use cases. I don't see very much value in being able to only see some of a window when it is being overlapped. Especially when if I need to see only a few lines of a window it would only be a few keystrokes away. Maybe C-o 2 C-x 3 C-x - C-x b window title which looks crazy but if you are a heavy emacs user with ace-window and ivy mode it's very natural.

It takes a bit of time to get used to it, especially since most tilling window manager I've used require a bit of customisation to bet to my taste but once I've been used to it, going back to clicking on menus, moving things around with a mouse or a touchpad is just not possible. I find this so inefficient, exhausting and, first and foremost, something that should be avoidable.

There are hybrid tiling window managers, like PopOS Shell. You can easily turn it on/off, including specific windows that you want to always cascade.

I use a rather heavily customized version of dwm myself, and I have things like custom placement rule: I want my editor to be in a specific "workspace" (or tag, in dwm parlance), I have keybindings to focus my editor, my terminal or my web browser in one single keystroke regardless of where I am (I always cringe a bit when I watch colleagues feverishly alt-tabbing to find the window they're looking for), I have added custom "sticky" windows that appear in all workspaces etc...

It takes a while to set up at first but I think it's well worth it in the long run. When I have to use a normal desktop environment on a different computer everything feels clunky and more complicated than it should be.

I tried out i3 for a while and generally liked it, but was never wizard-like with manipulating my tile stack. I could split horizontally and vertically, and swap around to a degree. Enough to get by and most importantly, line it all up and use all the space. ;)

These days, all the systems I use support the 98% use case I had for i3: either full screen, or vertical split (by dragging all the way right or left). I further discovered tmux so I can split a terminal window extra as needed. So, I haven't used i3 in a few years.

You mentioned you prefer lots of windows open? I'm 100% the opposite. I only want to see two at a time. At work I have two monitors and one is editor, the other is tmux'ed terminal, both maximized. Browser, maximized on one monitor. Document of some kind (pdf, etc.)? Maximized on the other monitor. At any time I'm selecting which two to see. Chat apps for group communication? I hide those because they are hugely distracting. (I check them now and then when I take a short break). At home I do something similar using virtual desktops, since I only have one monitor: browser in one virtual desktop, ebook or document in another, etc.

That's just way too fiddly and time-consuming for me. 99% of the time I want my windows maximized and stacked behind each other. i3 does this for me automatically, and requires absolutely no interaction from me to have them set up the way I want.

If I was using a floating window manager for that, I'd have to manually maximize them and manually stack them.

If I want windows to be positioned in some custom layout that I use one time and never again, there is no difference between i3 and floating window managers, because i3 lets me do exactly that in the same way as floating window managers do, as I can float any window in i3 and position and resize it normally.

However, if I want to repeat a particular window layout then I can configure i3 to automatically put windows in that layout. I used to do this with GIMP a long time ago, before it had single-window mode. Now I just use it as a single maximized window, and don't bother with that.

I make popup windows float, so those will appear centered and disappear without changing my window layout, as one would expect of popup windows.

Occasionally I'll manually float a window, when I want the kind of control you're talking about, or when I want it to overlap my default maximized window for some reason, but that's pretty rare.

At one point I had lots of windows open and positioned them how I wanted with the size I wanted, every time I used them. Then I realized that the positions and sizes actually didn't change for certain windows. And I hated having to move windows around all the time!

For example, my email program could always be in the same position with the same size, no need to make changes to this from one day to another.

Currently, I've got keyboard shortcuts to move the current window to a position/size I like. E.g. one keyboard shortcut for "covers 100% of the screen", another for "covers the right 75% (and 100% of the height) of the screen", and so on.

But this approach restricts you to specific arrangements of windows. E.g. if you want to have a "right 75%" window on top, with a "100%" window below it so that the left bit "peeks out", but the windows aren't always the same, then it gets more cumbersome to arrange it.

(In my case that doesn't apply because there is only one application that I run in "right 75%" mode and there are only two that I want to peek out from underneath.)

Tiling gives you convenient ways to have different arrangements without having to invest a lot of manual work, and for some people this is useful.

For example, dwm provides a layout of two columns, where a single tall window goes in the left column and the other windows go in the right column, stacked above each other. It is really easy to go through the windows, and it is also really easy to move one window into the left column. So you can have a main window that you are working in (in the left column) while you can watch the other windows on the right. And it's really convenient to to change the window you're working in, and you can always follow what is going on in the other windows.

I encourage you to try this different way of working for a bit. Maybe you can learn something from it. Perhaps it teaches you something new so that you an adapt the way you work.

The User is defining the way a tilling manager works, so all you do is conforming to your own way, but with a more efficient tool.

Manual window managment is not worth the timewaste in most usecases. And for the rare cases where it's still neccessary the better WMs still allow manual settings.

Do you use the same NixOS configuration across machines?

Do you use i3 with another desktop environment or by itself?

That's why I try my best to cope with the defaults and change when absolutely necessary. It spares a lot of frustration when you use another config since you can always go vanilla.

Edit: quoting

Do you mean that XWayland doesn't support HiDPI yet? I'm told it's coming ... some day (in a few months).

Meanwhile even Chromium got Wayland support so the last laggards on my machine are the JetBrains IDEs.

How often do you actually use other people's computers?

I virtually never do, and in the rare cases that I do I'm ssh'ing in to them from my own computer which is running i3, so it's not an issue.

Overall it has been a good experience. Once you get muscle memory for the shortcuts to move between windows and workspaces, resize and toggle fullscreen windows you can start really flying. The built-in cheatsheet mentioned by the parent poster helps to get there.

Bonus: when I'm sharing my desktop with a work colleague (they all use Macs) I often get asked how I'm doing what I'm doing so fast.

I do sometimes still get a little frustrated when I want to reorder windows in a workspace. It can be done but feels a bit like solving a Rubik's Cube. It would be nice to be able to do things like:

1. Rotate the windows (either direction) that touch all the screen edges and then inherit the window size that the window moves into.

2. Be able to flip window sets that touch the side edges, eg swap all the windows on the left with the right.

But Zoom is a nightmare. It's clearly only designed to work with conventional windows. It opens new windows a lot, and each time it does that, i3 grabs the new window and puts it in whatever workspace my mouse is currently at. I'm constantly shifting Zoom windows between fullscreen and normal mode, and switching workspaces for them. Starting a breakout session immediately kills everything and I have to start moving everything around again.

I get that Zoom isn't optimising their application for Linux, and especially not for i3. Fair enough, I'm in a tiny market segment here. But it's annoying enough that I want to warn people who want to try i3 that (no fault of i3) some applications really don't work well with it.

You could probably float those windows to solve this problem right?

I do agree about overlap being useful. In some cases overlapping ends up being one of the most efficient ways to use a few tools together to create an optimized workflow.

I made a video about this recently around taking advantage of "always on top"[0]. It's not an example of using a tiled window manager, but it does show how overlapping windows on another window lets you comfortably use a few programs together in a nice way. All operating systems have tools to get this behavior.

[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/always-on-top-lets-you-pin-a-...

The only thing one needs to do is configure environment variables to start qt and gtk apps in wayland mode.

> let me know of any questions regarding program compatibility under Wayland.

What types of programs might not work in Sway?

Looks like a side monitor will work wonders for you.

I have a setup with 3 monitors:

My main 4k monitor is used for coding only. I can have 5 open buffers, side by side, with close to 120 lines being displayed in each one of them.

I have a side monitor open with a terminal which shows me the logs of the running application, plus I can easily type any additional command there.

On the other monitor I have the browser open, usually with the documentation or stack overflow tab.

When I'm doing web development I have one monitor for the web app and another one for devtools.

It's amazing. No more fighting with screen space. I highly recommend it.

Also maybe check out Gnome Shell? Haven't tried it personally but tile-y and similar look and feel to modern GNOME/Unity, if that's what you're after.

The main pain point of stock ubuntu gnome for me right now is that when I open too many windows, my alt-tab becomes too cluttered, and it would be cool if there was a way to designate windows as background somehow (but not different workspace, I don't like workspaces), so that it would not show up in alt-tab. Ideally I would be able to have like 40 open windows of which just a handful are "active".

EDIT: The side bar could be used for bringing up windows if it didn't combine windows from the same program into one icon - a feature I absolutely loathe - seriously, I have a lot of empty screen real estate but instead you want to hide my windows behind a second click?

I use byobu(tmux) for managing my terminal splits, which is all i need. I also have removed any window decorations from my terminal. I have shortcuts configured in gnome which let me do the occasional side-by-side windows easily. I rarely use the mouse but I have the option.

Of course if you do a lot of crazy tiling like 3,3,2 or whatever, a tiling window manager might be a good idea. In my experience you just never need that. Maybe I am missing something.

The windows I have opened are: - the terminal (at most 4 tabs as well... but here my terminal allows me to easily switch to any numbered tab I want) - the IDE (sometimes). In most cases, my IDE can be run on my terminal (e.g., Vim) - a web browser (again, I try to keep the number of tabs to a minimum... but here it's harder to do so) - anything else (usually nothing)

Another reason to not use a tiling wms: yet another dependency I don't have to take care (as in: configuring and updating it).

Starting compton (which seems essential for i3 but the documentation doesn't mention it) didn't help. Enabling some Intel drivers fixed the screen tearing but broke my multimonitor setup.

Also dmenu is garbage compared to program search in modern desktop environments, it's just search for bash commands, half the results arent something you'd want to run from your desktop and it doesn't learn.

It makes sense that it's not popular, most people have better things to do than read a manual and learn a new configuration language with 100s of options just to move windows around.

One of the biggest gripes I had with i3 is things like volume, brightness, mute and so on. It's possible to configure everything to work again of course, but very painful. Other system related things that exist in gnome (wifi, bluetooth, sound, microphone) are also a pain to do without. Again, lots of tinkering needed to get things working anew.

0: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/i3/

1: https://manjaro.org/downloads/community/i3/

I think projects like this should link each other as alternatives though, to aid in discovery. Since they are for different protocols, I don't think they will lose anything by linking their "competitor".

I can see that sway mentions and links to i3, but I can't see anything similar from i3. Not sure if they haven't noticed it or if they are not fond of it.

I love i3 and it was my first experience with tiling WM years ago. It is absolutely a radical break for me from all other WM's since tiling allows me to work in deep focus many desktops, 1 desktop per activity/task and my focus always on one thing not many.

Also wanting not to miss out on the future I moved to sway in parallel. I am literally in sway 90% of the time. The only difference is if I have to use video / webRTC screensharing or similar (usually in the browser), in which case sway will not work. This is why I maintain a dual system of both i3/sway.

Also I trust i3 to be more stable for when I am standing in front of a crowd or have to connect my system to a variety of different external beamers, monitors etc.

It sounds nuts to "maintain" 2 WM's but my configuration and workflow never deviates no matter which system I use even across upgrades of i3/sway.

When I plug in a new freshly installed machine I just fetch my dotfiles and have both i3/sway in exactly the same way as I'm used to ... It's incredibly easy keeping both around if one has to (or wants to). Bonus of sway is also that it has gaps support (which is cool on bigger screens, less important on laptops).

edit: both sway / i3 gave me no problems at all running them under restrictive environments such as LD_PRELOAD=libhardened_malloc.so (from GrapheneOS) and also work with under firejail without problems. I'll stop since it's anyway clear I am a big fan of both :)

The most difficult part was to find a good wayland terminal and I recommend “foot”, https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot

https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

I really wish MacOS would just open up.

I’m interested to hear what you have in mind.

However, I would highlight, that it's ability to work in multi-monitor is huge selling point.

You would like to show something from an another screen, plug the cable, press suitable hotkey, and the workspace, that you were just working on, jumps to the new display. No need to move windows.

You go back to your desk and plug in the laptop. The workspaces will automatically jump to the monitors, per your config.

Next, you run to a meeting, the very same workspaces collapse back to laptop's monitor automatically.

There was no need to touch windows in any of these scenarios, And no more "I forgot the browser windows to the attached display" that has happened with some other systems.

I mostly put 1-3 windows per workspace, and generally use one workspace per task. My "main" browser window is always workspace 1. My todo lists are always workspace 2.

I then have one workspace set up to default to floating windows for apps that tends to go crazy with them, like e.g. gimp.

The other workspaces are usually split into 2 or 3 windows, usually two columns with one window taking a whole column by itself and the other column split in two "half-height". E.g. if I'm working on a web app, the browser will typically take up the biggest window. But I also have keybindings set up to let me easily move the active window left/right/up/down (it will swap places with the displaced window). I tend to move windows into a bigger space more often than I resize them.

Getting windows in the same space is easy for the most part - windows open on the space I have active, but I have keybindings set up to move the active window to a specific workspace, and you can also define rules for bspwm that sets up predefined slots for windows that "swallow" windows that match certain criteria, if there are certain apps you always want on certain workspace for example.

Switching windows to floating if the wm doesn't get it right is also just a keypress away.

bspwm can be fully controlled with a command line tool, so I also have scripts that will read a JSON file specifying a layout and recreate it and start the appropriate shells, browsers etc. I use the same plus an alias to change the name of the workspace based on the "nearest" project file working up from the last change of working directory on a given workspace. It's not perfect, but it means that e.g. if I "cd" into a project, the workspace name changes to reflect the project name, which does tend to make it easier to keep track of what I've put on which workspace.

It's no i3, but it covers a lot of usecases when I'm not on my linux box.

https://github.com/GGLucas/PyleWM

I use sway on Linux.

There is a learning curve but once you've got it you feel like you can't go back.

When I was using mac, I had similar setup using snap and keyboard maestro, only I had to ctr-tab in iterm like crazy if I had several projects. Not anymore.

Overall I feel that I manage all of it way less and have to go through way less stuff to find what I need.

I would never use emacs as a window manager, because it's simply not stable enough for me -- it crashes and hangs quite a lot, and I have to restart it from time to time when I update my configuration and want to test it out from scratch, or when emacs get confused after running it for a long time.

i3, by contrast, has been 100% stable for me, and I almost never have to quit or restart it. So it's completely reliable, and I don't ever have to worry about it not working.

Regarding i3's config, it's really easy, and except for occasionally telling i3 the title of windows I'd like to float by default, I haven't touched my i3 config in decades.

As for how I use i3, I mostly have one full window taking up the entire screen, with other windows in the background, as tabs that I can switch to. That's 99% of my use. Occasionally I manually make a window float, when I want some odd-sized window or want it to overlap another window, and some windows I make float by default. These floating windows are all very temporary. Sometimes I'll also change my tiling configuration so that more than one window appears on the screen at the same time, but that's also pretty rare, but it's there when I want it.

Overall, I'm much happier with a tiling WM than with a floating WM, because with a tiling WM I don't have to manually fiddle with window resizing, stacking, or positioning. 99% of the time i3 just automatically does the right thing without requiring any interaction from me.

It would be nice to use emacs for this, but it's just not nearly stable enough or reliable enough for me.

https://github.com/GGLucas/PyleWM

The author has recently added some nice features - a fuzzy search launcher and a fuzzy search for open windows.

My only complaint is it only supports two workspaces per monitor (I think). There's some sort of temporary workspace, but I haven't really found a use for those and they aren't really documented. However, with the new fuzzy window finder, you can just minimize windows and than search to bring them up quickly and with minimal key strokes.

Another thing: the readme hasn't been updated since the last big changes, so you'll find that you're gonna have to install more dependencies then it says.

1: https://github.com/pop-os/shell

The ability for one window to float over another was a later innovation and is of course more difficult to implement. The earliest versions of Windows were also tiling only, which is thus the traditional way.