i3 and sway

i3 all the way

I tried i3 back in 2019 and I’ve been using it ever since on my desktop.

I really like dwm. It doesn’t seem too popular so maybe the other ones are better but it was the first one I tried so the others feel weird to me. I like the idea behind suckless in general though.

I’ve been using i3. Nothing super advanced but the config is easy and being able to reload in place is nice

i3 is what I’ve been using the past few years. I’ve tried others, but I always end back up with i3 as I’ve found nothing else to be as simple and efficient for my workflow, with 12 workspaces across 2 monitors.

I use i3, but to say that I like it is a bit overstated. It’s fine, does what I expect the very basic of a tiling window manager to do. I used Nimdow for a while and it’s pretty good, the default bar is way better than i3 (supports ANSI colour coding, mouse presses, etc.), but I could never quite get to grips with the tiling algorithm.

I’m working on my own WM though, it’s not tiling per-se, I choose to call in non-overlapping and I’m trying to solve my gripes with i3. Basically windows should not be forcefully expanded if they don’t want to. Try open galculator under i3 and watch the horror. And when expanded the size should be split based on their initial sizes. So if I have Firefox open and want to do something in a quick terminal window the terminal won’t get 1/2 of the screen. Firefox wanted more space than the terminal initially, so the terminal gets to take up a smaller share of the space.

DWM due to it’s suckless nature

EXWM. I am a longtime Emacs user so merging the concepts of Emacs buffers and X windows is a huge benefit. Only one set of keybindings to worry about, all of my Emacs window management stuff works for X windows too. One less external dependency to worry about too. In a new environment (like when starting a new job etc) as long as I have my Emacs config I am good to go.

Sway with autotiling and a few nifty scripts (launch or focus and such) and Waybar. The combination of having scratchpads, sensible autotiling along with titlebars and the wonderful world of wayland is supreme.

Sway, but single window capture and the animations make hyprland very tempting…

Today I use Plasma, but if I need a tiling wm I use awesome. It’s so great and customizable. If you’re fine with Lua, is easy to config.

I started with for a bit awm, however i am giving qtile a try since im learning how to code python so good practice.

XMonad. Been using it for almost a decade, and very powerful. I3 I hear is also good.

HYPRLAND !