i3 VS bspwm

👉 i3 window manager

I switched to the i3 tiling based window manager. Because it's a whole different environment and thinking, it was very different from what I was used to. The volume buttons were working on my keyboard, but I didn't get any visual feedback. Furthermore, the volume percentage could go down below zero and increase up to more than hundread percent. There were times when I was confused why the keys stopped working, but the actual hidden reason was that the volume's value was somehow -500 percent, so increasing it by 5 percent via my keys would have taken a little time.

While I believe Memory Saver was a great improvement, it only works if the tab is hidden or the window minimized. I recently learned the required state is not triggered if the tab is open but on another virtual desktop. At least this is the case with many of not all Linux window managers. Some of the many discussion threads on the topic:

https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/4353

This is partially why i use tools like i3 (/ sway). i like the tool; it works extremely well for me; the design has stayed the same for 20 years; there's no profit motive to come along and fuck everything up. it just works. it is boring in the best way possible.

I use MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid-2014) with Manjaro as OS using i3 as a window manager. It isn't perfect, but I'm thrilled with it. I have been a Mac OS user for the last 15 years and wouldn't change what I have now for a Mac OS because I don't need more than what I'm using for development.

Even though, we have moved the official i3 support channel to GitHub discussions, i3's biggest community is still on reddit and if things continue like that there is going to be a lot of helpful content on an increasingly closed platform.

Over on Linux, I’ve been learning kinda a-lot about linux tools and workflows. I've recently got into window managers, bspwm was my first one and I'm thinking of moving towards a Arch+Hyprland setup in future. Setting it up was way easier than I thought, and I got inspired by a YouTuber named jvscholz, who’s all about minimalism and productivity.

The biggest QOL improvements imo are found in the approach to the user-facing API design.

Compare basic multi-monitor commands in something like bspwm[1] or yabai[2][3] to twms on Windows where this is typically handled transparently by directional `move` and `focus` commands understanding monitor boundaries.

Besides this, Whim has implemented a very functional ctrl+p style command palette which provides a great interface for more advanced on-the-fly/one-time window manager interactions.

With komorebi I think that having different border colours to indicate different types of containers is very helpful (one colour for single window stacks, a different colour for monocle containers, a different colour for stacks with multiple windows), as well as custom window-based work area offsets[4] (so if you have an ultrawide monitor with only a single window on a workspace, you can add offsets to the sides so it doesn't stretch across the whole width and give poor usability).

It's not really any one "big thing" but rather a difference in approach which adds up over many small design decisions.

[1]: https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm/issues/563

Bspwm is a window manager. Configuration happens in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/bspwm/bspwmrc, as per stated here: https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm

Use BSPWM. It supports right clicks by default and its modular. You might want to look for status bars that work with it, slstatus does not work. Good luck, supremacist!

I had not heard of bspwm but I am a fan of telling WMs. Looking at the documentation now, I really like the pragmatic approach lol https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm

If you use the bspwm off of github instead of the old 0.9.10, you can use bspc node @parent -y next to cycle the split type of the parent of the focused. I added it ~1.5years ago, after baskerville added node -y horizontal and node -y vertical to set the split type of a node to vertical/horizontal ~2 years ago.

Also bspwm's JSON generation and parsing is not great. If you have a window with quotes in its class name, bspwm, when dumping it, will not escape them generating invalid JSON (e.g. {"className":"the "cool" window",) that jq will not be able to read, and even worse, bspwm itself will not be able to read. (Yes, if a window's class name contains a " character, bspwm will fail to reload after you run wm -r #1362).