linux VS i3

Compare linux vs i3 and see what are their differences.

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linux i3
76 200
- 9,053
- 1.7%
- 7.6
- 3 days ago
C
- BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

linux

Posts with mentions or reviews of linux. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-26.
  • Linux Mint Working on Wayland Support
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Oct 2023
    It's actually incredibly useful to have apps like window managers or apps that rely on manipulating user input like xcape read another apps data. In fact such are still possible just 10x as complicated as they now involve writing awful little programs in some combination of c and yaml instead of a dead simple single line shell invocation of a program.

    See https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/tools

    The fact that this can work at all seems to suggest that its just as possible for malicious code running as user to compromise your security and the only thing actually broken is useful apps.

  • Issue with interception-tools
    1 project | /r/archlinux | 1 Oct 2023
    After updating my system after a while, i found Interception-tools to not working . It fails on a dependency on libyaml-cpp.so.0.7
  • <ESC> substitution
    1 project | /r/vim | 1 Aug 2023
    You can try to use https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/tools/-/tree/master
  • Mapping Caps-Lock to Esc is life changing
    3 projects | /r/vim | 8 Jun 2023
  • What's a very simple config change that you can't live without?
    11 projects | /r/neovim | 2 Jun 2023
    Having both is a game-changer. Depends on your OS. On Mac, I use Karabiner. Linux I used use caps2esc and on Windows I use a custom AutoHotKey.
  • Emacs-written novel on the German bestseller list
    3 projects | /r/emacs | 21 May 2023
    Before that I had used interception tools for key rebindings, which relied on the udevmon service to intercept keypress events, and thus even works in a TTY terminal, not requiring a window manager. I use vim keybindings in Emacs and for that I found it useful to rebind ESC to CTRL if tapped, but it still acts as CTRL when held (now I have implemented that in my keyboard firmware).
  • newbie doubt here
    1 project | /r/tmux | 20 May 2023
    In addition to using ctrl+a as prefix... some of us remap capslock to ctrl so then the two buttons are right next to each other and easy to press with one motion. (This then makes it possible to have that key be ctrl when pressed in combo with another key or esc when pressed on its own.)
  • Mapping Alt+hjkl to arrow keys (sway, wayland)
    1 project | /r/linuxquestions | 23 Apr 2023
    i use both X and Wayland and i also have a lot of key switching going on. So to have a universal config that works under both protocols i have to go lower than the display server protocols. I looked around for such a thing and finally found the interception tool
  • How to swap Caps Lock and Ctrl?
    1 project | /r/AlpineLinux | 20 Apr 2023
    Do you know about https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/plugins/caps2esc? It makes it ctrl when held in combo with another key or esc when pressed on its own w/o other key (I loved it before ergodox) and there are some related plugins there for other keyboard customizations as well.
  • TUTORIAL: Making Caps do both Control and Esc like Caps2Esc, but with only hyprland+ydotool
    2 projects | /r/hyprland | 18 Mar 2023
    Caps2Esc is a very useful input remapping utility: it turns the Caps key into either Esc or Control depending on how it's used: - if the Caps key is released before another key is pressed, it emits Esc - If the Caps key is used in chording mode, like by pressing Caps and C, it emits Control, to send Control-C

i3

Posts with mentions or reviews of i3. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-19.
  • Show HN: Chrome Reaper
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Dec 2023
    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

  • Firefox 121 defaults to Wayland on Linux
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Dec 2023
    > This is very true, and unfortunately there are very few people working on linux accessibility (including not me! I am part of the problem!).

    Accessibility work itself ironically suffers from an accessibility problem. I brought up i3wm above, the issue for that is pretty illuminating: https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/3393

    It's not that the devs are saying "this doesn't matter", the devs behind one of the most popular tiling window managers in the X11 ecosystem are saying, "this does matter, but we don't know how to fix it. We don't know what changes we'd need to make to get Orca working."

    It's a really fundamental breakdown that's kind of a tragedy because I honestly believe that if accessibility communities were more heavily baked into testing and development in Linux and if this wasn't treated like two separate worlds, it would be better for everyone -- fixing accessibility concerns very often improves interfaces across the board and makes them more powerful.

    But... how do you bridge that gap? I don't really know, I tried looking into Orca to see what would need to happen here and bounced off of it pretty hard, it's not a very approachable tech stack and there aren't tutorials or getting started guides. And on the other side of the issue I can preach about needing accessibility input during interface design, but I'm not in a position to give specific advice because I don't use screenreaders or alternate control schemes and I don't know what the biggest problems are.

    The people who need to be involved in that process can't get involved because there's a tech barrier in place even for technically inclined people, and because the underlying software locks them out from the start. i3wm isn't ever going to get someone who's intimately familiar with Orca to jump into the conversation because the people who need to use Orca can't use i3wm. So that leaves the people who can address that tech barrier, but they don't know what to do or how to approach the problem because of the lack of involvement and because the communities are isolated from each other. So it's a chicken-and-egg problem and I don't know how to solve it.

  • "We understand" ;)
    2 projects | /r/discordapp | 9 Dec 2023
    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.
  • what machines have you used for development, and what do you prefer?
    1 project | /r/webdev | 4 Jul 2023
    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.
  • The future of /r/i3wm
    1 project | /r/i3wm | 18 Jun 2023
    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.
  • while in i3wm, krita dockers move downwards a bit each time they're spawned - how do I fix this?
    1 project | /r/i3wm | 12 Jun 2023
  • i3wm-like window switching for Windows
    1 project | /r/software | 9 Jun 2023
  • egui_overlay - A transparent Overlay window where you can only click the "egui parts"
    3 projects | /r/rust | 4 Jun 2023
    for example, take i3. https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/4478
  • How to start on a Linux desktop environment?
    2 projects | /r/osdev | 4 Jun 2023
  • Machine for pentesting and general use?
    1 project | /r/Kalilinux | 23 May 2023
    For daily usage I really like kubuntu with i3wm, but it takes some configuration and getting used to the shortcuts, but it's well worth it

What are some alternatives?

When comparing linux and i3 you can also consider the following projects:

Rectangle - Move and resize windows on macOS with keyboard shortcuts and snap areas

sway - i3-compatible Wayland compositor

keyd - A key remapping daemon for linux.

awesome - awesome window manager

kinto - Mac-style shortcut keys for Linux & Windows.

bspwm - A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

xcape - Linux utility to configure modifier keys to act as other keys when pressed and released on their own.

wslg - Enabling the Windows Subsystem for Linux to include support for Wayland and X server related scenarios

Mailspring-Libre - (archived) Mailspring Libre build – aiming at removing Mailspring's dependecy on a central server

xmonad - The core of xmonad, a small but functional ICCCM-compliant tiling window manager

QuickLook - Bring macOS “Quick Look” feature to Windows

tmux - tmux source code