i3-auto-layout VS dotfiles

The problem with this fairly complex solution is that the easier path by far is simpler window arrangements, multiple monitors, and many workspaces. Once you have more windows than fit on a workspace its easier just to have more workspaces and 1-3 windows is what basically universally fits on most monitors.

If you organize more things in the same space you probably need indivdual apps that themselves have tabs like browsers, editors, IDEs rather than more windows.

Personally I use https://github.com/chmln/i3-auto-layout to make slightly better layouts automatically be automatically alternating between v and h splits and find this fits my needs 95% of the time.

Shit work under i3 is already very small but if you wanted to reduce it further I think you could probably go a long way with a very simple feature.

Add a save button that saves current layout to a list like so

Browser, calculator

Browser, pdf reader

terminal terminal terminal

ide terminal terminal

Then have a restore function that simply walks the list finds the entry that matches the kind and number of window and shoves existing windows into that layout. You can at creation time use something like i3-save-tree, edit the json, yada yada but its all fairly manual and I think for the use case it would be relatively simpler. The few non standard all match for me a simple pattern eg there really isn't 2 different ways I want IDE terminal terminal

i3-auto-layout is faster and less resource usage

For me launching Gnome with xmonad as the window manager stopped working a few years ago. Instead I have xmonad set to autostart 2 seconds into a desktop session with --replace set. dotfiles

With regards to 1, I've got a system that works pretty well for me. You can look in my dotfiles and the script called setup-xmonad.sh. I've configured things to run xmonad --replace shortly after the desktop comes up and that works great.

> xmonad itself can’t run with modern Gnome

That's not really true. I use the gnome-flashback sesson and have an .desktop in ~/.config/autostart that runs xmonad --replace after I log in. It's true that logging in with a gnome session using xmonad as the WM isn't really an option any more but switching to xmonad after login continues to work great and is easier to set up than creating your own session ever was.

https://github.com/aclough/dotfiles/blob/master/setup-xmonad...

I wasn't able to get those instructions to work on more recent versions of Ubuntu. In my dotfiles and setup repo I've got a solution that works for me using autostart and xmonad --replace.

Yes, there's stuff that you can't get just from parsing the man page too, but it's a huge help. I know it's not done every startup, I have running that as part of my "update everything" script.

https://github.com/aclough/dotfiles/blob/master/mupdate.sh

I've been using XMonad for over 10 years now. Originally I went with Awesome but then decided I liked still having a normal desktop environment and XMonad's integration with Gnome was really easy.

The way I've done this has changed a bit over the years, these days I drop a file in .config/autostart letting xmonad replace the normal window manager after Gnome gets itself sorted out.

https://github.com/aclough/dotfiles

Hmm, I don't use a vertical panel so it might not be comparable. My dotfiles are here though if you want to take a look.