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Comment by tazeg95 | Hacker News Reader

I switched to i3 from gnome. Now I don't waste time to resize, move, close, reduce windows with the mouse. Just learn a few keyboard shortcuts to do this, that you can set as you want. Moreover I was frustated about applets in the status bar, so I did it myself and it's easy with some bash and pyton : https://en.jeffprod.com/blog/2020/create-your-own-i3-sway-st...

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Do your keyboard media keys work?

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.

My keyboard volume keys up and down are working. But I did nothing about this in i3. I think this is related to the system. About my status bar when I click on the volume, I open "alsamixer" in a terminal. I also have, wifi, network, dropbox as tray icons. Wifi and Lan icons come from the package networkmanager.

You can run gnome settings daemon “behind” i3 with i3-gnome and regolith. It will handle the media keys, locking, auto mount etc.

I had to fix this - and fix VLC taking over my media keys if it ever started. I didn't find it too painful, but it's definitely annoying that I had to work this out myself.

Just wanted to touch on media keys. I've recently discovered playerctl and that media players expose standard dbus interface for playerctl to use. In (bare) i3 I bind XF86AudioPlay to "exec playerctl play-pause" (etc.) and it seems to "just work", with spotify client, youtube, youtube music (both in firefox)

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