====== i3wm ======

**i3wm** is a simple tiling window manager for Linux. Customisation is easy, and it comes with useful defaults.

===== Config =====

==== Bar ====
You can set different bars for different screens. For example I find it useful to have time, date, battery, and volume always on my laptop screen, and have some monitoring stuff like free disk space, Internet bandwidth, and RAM usage when i have a secondary monitor plugged-in.

So I have two seperate ''bar{}'' sections in my main i3 config file, one for each screen. You just need to give them each a label, a screen to target, and a seperate config to load.

For example this is at the top of each ''bar'' definition:

  id bar-main
  output LVDS1
  status_command	i3blocks -c ~/.config/i3blocks/config-main

  id bar-secondary
  output VGA1
  status_command	i3blocks -c ~/.config/i3blocks/config-secondary

==== Floating Windows ====

Some useful lines to set some windows to always float:

<code ini>
for_window [title="alsamixer"]								floating enable
for_window [title="Calculator"]								floating enable, move position center
for_window [class="Firefox" instance="Navigator"]			floating enable
for_window [class="Godot" instance="Godot_ProjectList"]		floating enable
for_window [instance="Godot_Engine" title="\(DEBUG\)$"]		floating enable
for_window [class="Lazarus"]								floating enable
for_window [title="MediaInfo"]								floating enable
for_window [title="Minecraft Launcher"]						floating enable
for_window [title="Page Info*"]								floating enable
for_window [class="pcmanfm" instance="Confirm File Replacing"]	move position center
for_window [title="Preferences$"]							floating enable
for_window [title="Radiotray-NG Bookmark Editor"]			floating enable
for_window [title="Screenshot Uploader"]					floating enable
for_window [class="Steam" title="^Steam Community Market"]	floating enable
for_window [class="Thunderbird" title="^Edit Event"]		floating enable
</code>

And here's a useful trick to have a shortcut to load a terminal window floating. So I have ''Meta+Enter'' to open a regular terminal window, and ''Meta+Shift+Enter'' to open a floating one. I use it a bunch when I want to quickly open a terminal, do something, and close it again; EG grab a video with [[yt-dlp]]:

<code ini>bindsym $mod+Shift+Return exec --no-startup-id urxvt -geometry 80x26 -name "floating_urxvt"
for_window [class="URxvt" instance="floating_urxvt$"] floating enable</code>

What this does is set a shortcut to launch [[urxvt]], specify window dimensions, and give it a name. Then we use the regular stuff we use to tell a window to float, and target that specific window by the name we gave it. Can't remember where I read this, but I wish I'd always known it!

===== Tools =====
  * [[github>talwrii/i3parse|i3parse]] - scans config file for unused keys (+?)
  * [[dunst]] - easy to setup and customise desktop notifications.

{{tag>guide linux window-manager}}