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I3 Alternatives
Similar projects and alternatives to i3
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AppSignal
Monitoring that respects your time & budget. APM, error tracking, and dashboards for modern web apps. Ten-minute setup, transparent flat pricing, and support from engineers who actually use the product.
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kitty
If you live in the terminal, kitty is made for you! Cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based.
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Kargo
Stop Scripting Promotions. Start Shipping with Kargo. Kargo automates promotion across dev, staging, and prod with approval gates and verification. Open source, built by the team behind Argo CD. Download now.
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omarchy
Discontinued Beautiful, Modern & Opinionated Linux [Moved to: https://github.com/omacom/omarchy] (by basecamp)
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NOTE:
The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives.
Hence, a higher number means a better i3 alternative or higher similarity.
i3 discussion
i3 reviews and mentions
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 2026-09-02.
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My journey to "I use arch btw"
In my case, I decided to go with a compositor instead of desktop environment. I have already used others windows tilling managers such as i3wm. This time, I want something that has more features out-of-the-box.
- GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
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Why I traded my custom "Opinionated Linux" for Omarchy
I've been using Omarchy as my main setup since June 26, 2025, the day DHH released the first version. Before that I had my own custom Opinionated Linux, mclovin-ARCHived: an Arch + i3wm installer set up exactly the way I liked. It was total control over the OS: me deciding what goes in, keeping every piece (i3wm, polybar, picom, kitty, dotfiles) up to date and making sure they all talked to each other for the whole OS to keep working. It did the job, but it was costly to keep up to date: always digging into some new TUI to solve a small issue, and changing CPU or laptop meant checking compatibility for everything and tweaking for each machine.
- [PT-BR] Por que troquei meu "Opinionated Linux" autoral (DIY) pelo Omarchy
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Omarcacca
Then few years back, in 2015, I got shown i3wm and used it on my ubuntu-netinstall until 2020, then I switched to Budgie and my personal laptop has been using that ever since.
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Workspace on Demand in i3wm
I have been using i3 as a Window Manager for years now. And while I love working with i3, there is one thing I found annoying. And that is that it lacks context awareness. What do I mean by this? I use it in several contexts: "Client", "Company", and "Personal". Meaning, I'm in either client mode, company mode or personal mode. And 'client mode' can mean working with one or multiple clients at once. I pitched my initial idea on i3's discussion pages and someone else asked about something similar as KDE's "Activities".
- The Cybershard Keyboard Layout
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Lite 🚀 ApolloNvim Distro 2024
👉 i3 window manager
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Automatic Visual Feedback for System Volume Change in I3wm via Dunst
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.
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Show HN: Chrome Reaper
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
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 11 Sep 2026
Stats
Basic i3 repo stats
209
10,567
7.3
about 2 months ago
i3/i3 is an open source project licensed under BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License which is an OSI approved license.
The primary programming language of i3 is C.
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