How Cool i3 Window Manager!

2 minute read

Published:

As a Linux lover, have you ever try window manager like i3wm? If you didn’t try it yet, let me inform you how powerful it is.

i3wm

i3 is a dynamic tilling window manager inspired by wmii that is primarily targeted at developers and advanced users 1. The goal is to control the appearance and placement of windows in a windowing system. It can be used as a part of Desktop Environment like GNOME or KDE, but also it can be used as standalone applications 2. Currently I have used this window manager as a kind of standalone applications. If you want to do efficiently in your computer without worrying about the good viewer of desktop environment looks like, try it and let you enjoy to all these features!

Overview of i3 Window Manager

Overview of i3 Window Manager

Why should we use i3? 2

  1. Minimalism, you can enjoy your computer what only you want.
  2. Screen real estate, minimising a program is useless!
  3. Keyboard-driven workflow, mouse can be rarely used!
  4. Flexibility to set up by your own configuration
  5. Easy to control workspaces

Controling i3wm using Keyboard Shortcuts

That’s the point! As a user who deep in the Linux environment, terminal is everything. All of the stuffs can be done efficiently by using command lines. Okay, these are some configurations to do in i3wm. In this session, I used cheatography.com as a reference to see the default of i3 window manager keyboard shortcuts.

Controlling i3

Keyboard keyDescription
$mod+Shift+rReload i3
$mod+Shift+eExit i3

Note: Reload i3 is important if you want to reset or update the configuration file on i3 so that you can use it directly without restarting the computer.

Manage Windows

Keyboard keyDescription
$mod+Shift+qKill current window
$mod+Shift+numMove current window to workspace number num
$mod+Shift+fSet window to floating mode
$mod+jFocus on window to the left
$mod+kFocus on window above
$mod+lFocus on window below
$mod+;Focus on window to the right
$mod+Shift+jMove window left
$mod+Shift+kMove window up
$mod+Shift+lMove window down
$mod+Shift+;Move window right

Note: I am not familiar with the default kill current window, so I change the key with Ctrl+F4 in i3 config file. You can check the file in the directory ~/.config/i3/config. In addition, focusing on certain window can be done by using $mod+{arrow}. Great!

Workspaces

Keyboard keyDescription
$mod+numSwitch to workspace num
$mod+Shift+numMove current window to workspace number num

Containers

Keyboard keyDescription
$mod+eDefault container
$mod+hHorizontal split container
$mod+vVertical split container
$mod+wTabbed container
$mod+fToggle fullscreen mode
$mod+sToggle stacking mode
$mod+S­hif­t+SpaceToggle floating mode

Note: These are powerful keyboard shortcuts for managing the container.

Applications

Keyboard keyDescription
$mod+enterOpen new terminal window
$mod+dOpen dmenu

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