The unreasonable effectiveness of i3, or: ten years of a boring desktop env

What I love most about Linux is you can keep the same workflow for as long as you like. Of course, in practice you always end up tweaking and improving, but it's not on the whim of the decisions of some corporation.

Note that modern Linux is also leaning towards the same trend. But i admit it is still much easier to avoid those for power users. Snap, i'm looking at you also...

Due to the nature of my work and clients, using Mac or MS Windows as primary OS has been too prevalent. It’s easier to go with the flow than fight it.

So over the years i’ve learned to let go of the highly optimized desktop workflow and started to simplify it instead. Think of keeping less windows around to create better focus. Or use tabs more as a way to group related work.

I see a similar behavior with my vim usage. I used to have very heavily customized vim config. Nowadays i just stick with stock config. I guess over the years i started to embrace defaults more. It’s easier for me to learn defaults than to fight the “system”.

Pretty sure i would still be using i3 if my professional environment was more flexible (less enterprise).

The original Macintosh could only run one application at a time, though the application could have several documents open at a time. With the introduction of multitasking, a decision had to be made. Apple decided to go with something that resembles the multiple document interface, except all of the windows for a single application were effectively placed on a single layer (rather than being contained within another window, which was quite common on Windows back in the day). What you are seeing in that multiple screen setup is effectively a historical artifact.

Used to use the Alt+Tab app which makes it more sane, but I eventually removed it to preserve bloat.

Now I switch windows using Spotlight by typing the name of the app I want to switch to.

I also really enjoy being able to open a new terminal with a single keystroke.

Whereas on Windows I'm always losing the tab I'm looking for, when trying to alt-tab between things. I know that there are better tools now, like Win Key + Tab (Which does also allow you to set up virtual desktops and have completely separate sets of programs visibly running) but it doesn't feel like the primary mode this desktop environment was designed for.

As far as splitting tabs, resizing, etc, Windows 11 is more polishing and feels really nice to use but functionality feels same same as Sway/i3 to me.

Ethos: I use both Sway (Wayland spiritual successor to i3 [which is X11 based]) and Windows 11 on a daily basis.

And then, if you have more windows, and want to move them between workspaces, move windows within the workspace, send them to background, and don´t want to use the mouse, it will show more value.

I also appreciate environments like i3 have less visual clutter. If you were to look at my desktop, you would see precisely six things on it: the application windows, the current time, the battery status, the network status, a list of virtual desktops, and a toggle to disable the screensaver. There is nothing to pull my focus away from the task at hand, not even in the background.

Of course, I also have a laundry list of other quality of life features. Most of those features would be pointless to point out since they would be irrelevant to most people. (To give one example of what I mean: configuration is done through a simple collection of text files, so it is easy to carry my configuration from one account to another. This isn't so much a benefit of tiling window managers, since it is true of most window managers. It is better described as a drawback of complex desktop environments.)

- a button brings up a rofi to select one of the folders in my home dir

- It automatically creates a window Group ("desktop") when one of these is selected, and chdirs into that folder.

- There are keys for a browser profile (qutebrowser!) and tmux session for the current group, which are always created or focused with the same key, so if I close one mistakenly, or power-off my machine, these keys bring me right back where I was.

- I have a key for the "main" application of a workspace - typically the IDE - but this "main" application can be configured per workspace with a little marker-file.

- I then have mod+s, which switches between all windows that are not one of the three above (what xMonad would call 'boring' windows).

- I have another rofi for showing all open apps across all groups - and switching to the selected group + focusing the selected app.

- I have one more rofi, for selecting a group (or directory name) to move the focused window into it.

- Offtopic, but I also have some rofis for workspace-specific clipboard history and a workspace todo file, the top-line of which is echoed into the bar, to keep me on track.

The layout is the smallest part of it all, although being able to have whatever my imagination can desire in terms of layout IS kind of nice. I default to single-window 'monacle' layout, and spend most of my time in a standard "columns" layout.

In qtile's column layout, we can 'maximize' windows in a particular column, instead of stacking them vertically. now, windows can be hidden ("lost" is the commonly used word), but knowing exactly which key moves to which window means it becomes more about "feeling that I need X" rather than "finding X" - it just appears when I want it.

It's one of my favorite moments, and it always comes - when someone's watching me do a merge, or i'm having a skype session - people can't really believe how fast I can move. I have to narrate with the brakes on. And watching someone use regular window managers, even with some tiling shortcuts, is inexpressibly frustrating.

I want to help them, but I can't.

1. At first glance most people don’t even see the difference between i3 and most other OSes. 2. The entire OS industry, from Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, the vast majority of Linux DEs, changed the UI every few years. The implication being that the UIs improve with those changes. The author by not changing their OS’es UI/UX and preferring that is going against the industry expectation (ie being unreasonable).

In terms of advantages of i3 over other options, there are many.

1. The UI is extremely keyboard focused. You basically never have to use a mouse unless the application itself requires it. 2. It’s trivial to add a new window and remain tiled unlike non tiling window managers where you need to manually tile. 3. Workspaces! Switching between upto 10 workspaces is trivial (I used to have 10…I’m sure you can do more but even 10 were too many for me). 4. Performance. The UI was just way faster than any other OS I’ve used even when overlayed on top of Gnome.

You can alt-tab between them on a single screen, you can switch or swipe virtual desktops with them, you can do anything, a result will be the same.

There are no advantages because of this sameness.

So ctrl+r and the command `mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb` is in my history already. No difficulty here, as I mount a USB device like once a month or two.