I3 Window Manager

I've been using xfce4 as my primary window manager for some time now. Its pretty light weight and works really well on my laptop. I sometimes use an Acer D270 with 2GB Ram and 1.6Ghz processor, which is weak.

However, I decided I wanted to try out something new. I'd never actually used another window manager in linux apart from the defaults provided by various distros and xfce4 ( which I always install). So I did some digging around and found i3.

i3 is a tiling window manager, and my current default window manager too. I don't know if its the greatest one or even a good one. It was just the first other window manager I tried after xfce4 and I liked it a lot. In fact, I liked it so much that I haven't tried tinkering with another window manager yet.

To install i3 in archlinux:

sudo pacman -S i3wm i3lock i3status dmenu

The default i3 config file works but I had to make some of my changes.

First off, I really like the xfce4-terminal, so I wanted to still use it as my default terminal. This terminal also has a drop-down feature which I use a lot, so I also had to figure out a way to do this. So this was my change to support this:

bindsym $mod+Return exec xfce4-terminal
# xfce4 dropdown terminal
bindsym F12 exec xfce4-terminal --drop-down
for_window [class="xfce4-terminal"] floating enable

Since I'm a dedicated vim user, I also had to find a way to customize i3 to work similarly to vim.

# change focus
bindsym $mod+h focus left
bindsym $mod+j focus down
bindsym $mod+k focus up
bindsym $mod+l focus right

# move focused window
bindsym $mod+Shift+h move left
bindsym $mod+Shift+j move down
bindsym $mod+Shift+k move up
bindsym $mod+Shift+l move right

There are also some custom applications I use, and that I wanted to start up with i3. An example is redshift. To do that I just added this to the config file.

# redshift
exec --no-startup-id redshift-gtk

To take a screenshot, I decided to use scrot. Here is my addition to i3 for that.

# scrot screen shot
bindsym $mod+p exec "scrot ~/Downloads/Screenshot%Y-%m-%d%H:%M:%S.png"

To change the desktop wallpater, I decided to use feh.

# background image
exec feh --bg-scale ~/Pictures/i3_solarized.png

To use i3lock, add the following to the config: .. code-block:: bash

#setting up i3lock exec --no-startup-id xautolock -time 1 -locker 'i3lock -n'

I'll be making a lot of more changes to my i3 config file. To checkout what I've implemented or changed you can view the latest config file here