Last year I switched to i3, a tiling window manager. Or so I thought. The day after I returned to work where I have a widescreen standard DPI screen (my laptop has an HDPI one). The screen was black and work being work I had other things to do than to configure an external monitor so I opened my GNOME session… and forgot about i3.

Fast forward to FOSDEM 2020, probably no accident my tiling window interest peaks around this time of the year. A friend is showing off Regolith. Easy and beautiful, even the media keys have a nice popup showing the change in volume or brightness, just like macOS.

I did try Regolith the same evening and it looks great but once I started tweaking the config I realized I might as well start from scratch and learn the “real” one. Regolith isn’t always clear where to change its settings: is it i3 or GNOME?

Time to dust of my old i3 install (which by now was a half configured sway setup). This time I made sure it worked on my standard DPI screen first and simply close my laptop lid when at work.

Here we are, two weeks in, still rocking i3.

Is it better than GNOME? Not sure yet, I still use my mouse way too often. I haven’t configured my status bar yet and I can’t decide if I need a dedicated “browser” workspace or a “work” one with browser, terminal and Vim on the same workspace. Time will tell.

Open issues

• Opening a context menu close to the bottom of the screen hides part of the menu. Annoying.
• I would still switch to sway (Wayland being the future and all) but it will kill my motivation. Let’s understand how i3 works first.
• I manually change .Xresources and .config/i3/config each time I switch between the HDPI laptop and external standard DPI monitor, I need to script this.
• My “smart quotes” shortcuts don’t work yet.
• Assigning windows to workspaces is cool but I want them in the same position, there is probably a way to do this.
• Firefox rendering is really slow on my HDPI screen, it screams on my external standard DPI monitor, why?

Resources

• i3wm: Jump Start, a great three-part video series on getting started with i3 by Code Cast.
• The i3 documentation is well written and full of examples.
• The Regolith GitHub repositories are a treasure throve to steal configuration bits.