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Comment by stormbrew | Hacker News Reader

I would honestly pay money for a proper, relatively simple, DE written around i3. I like tiling because it makes me productive and helps me organize my desktop, not because it gives me a hard on to not be able to use my volume button or to have firefox look incredibly ugly.

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Seems like those people tend to use the OS as their DE and eschew integrated IDEs. One pane for tests, one for grep/ask, one for vim/emacs, shell, etc...

I do this with XFCE and it works really well. You just have to prevent xfce-panel and xfwm from starting up and autostart i3 instead. Replacing i3 with xfwm on the fly also works like a charm, I can toggle between tiling and floating WM's using keyboard shortcuts.

When I try to use xfce components they interfere a lot with keyboard shortcuts. I'm not sure why, but most of the gtk-compatible DEs bundle keyboard shortcut stuff with the settings-daemon, which is really the piece I miss most. It just leaves things feeling more broken to me, but maybe I'm doing something wrong.

I generally add custom application shortcuts to XFCE's keyboard preferences instead of i3's config and change i3's $mod to the Alt key. Haven't had any problems of conflicting shortcuts.

I much prefer having window management stuff on super since I use a lot of terminal apps where alt is important. Can't overload too much there or things get funky. And I have a lot of custom window management keycombos for i3 because the basic set are a bit bare.

I'd actually like to go the other way, a Gnome-less setup. Have seen some interesting setups with Awesome WM to that affect.

Bit too lazy/would like to keep coding and not spend weeks replacing the good in Gnome with whatever the alternatives are.

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