i3 & urxvt
After trying several Tiling Window Managers with Linux (awesome, dwm, wmii, musca), I installed i3 yesterday, with which I’m pretty satisfied.
“awesome” is a very full-featured window manager in the list, with features like status panel built inside. The most noticeable thing should be the author’s rapid development on it, usually resulting out big changes on the configuration file for the users. However, it’s not a big deal for geeks who’re really love the wm (Window Manager).
“dwm” is the most slim software I’ve ever known: a very usable wm with less than 2000 lines of code. Due to this simplicity, the configuration thing is just altering the source of it and then recompile. GEEK enough I once tried it also on Opensolaris and it worked pretty good too. Also because of being too simple, it’s not as featured as other wm, e.g. the it has limited kinds of layout.
Then I switched to “wmii”, which is developed by the same authors of “dwm”. The first thing to note is that wmii has title bar for windows (though not Chinese-characters-friendly by default). My favorite feature of wmii is it’s auto-hide workspaces: workspaces are created when you start to use them, and would disappear automatically if no windows there.
After that I tried “musca”, which is manual-layout (all the ones mentioned above are auto-layout), meaning that the wm doesn’t choose a default layout for you, instead, you create the layout by hand and place which windows in which part of the layout. The most unhappy thing is the lack of the auto-hide workspaces like in wmii. Actually I simulated it by key-binding configurations, however, it’s not as good, and also is a overhead.
As an improvement to wmii which I kept for not a short time, it feels like home to work with i3, though the default key bindings of “j k l ;” might be strange to Vim uses like me, which doesn’t matter much since they are fully configurable. I changed them to “h j k l”, and use “i” to replace the default “h” to change to the vertical-tabs layout. The full configuration will be listed below (~/.i3/config).
Here is a screenshot
Configuration file: ~/.i3/config. For the latest version, check
http://github.com/cooky/dotfiles_archlinux/blob/master/.i3/config
1 | # File: ~/.i3/config |
Here is my .Xdefaults, where you can find config for urxvt (rxvt-unicode) e.g. transparency setting
1 | ! ~/.Xdefaults |
Finally, my ~/.xinitrc for starting i3 and setting wallpaper
# set wallpaper
exec feh --bg-scale /home/cooky/Pictures/wallpapers/world/bl1920.jpg &
# use the "-l" option until version "3e"
exec i3 -l
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