Youtube says it was posted around 5.5 years ago, but pretty much all of it is still relevant. i3 Configuration Screencast: I think this screen-cast is relatively well-known at this point.Rather than repeat everything, I thought I’d point to some guides that have helped me along the way. There are a few pretty good tutorials for getting started with i3 out of the box. I actually don’t have much to add for setup and installation. With that being said, let’s dive into some of the configurations available to us in i3! Getting Started Don’t get me wrong, this is definitely a blessing and a curse, but it’s fun to learn more about these processes. For me, it’s also a chance to deal more intimately with a lot of the things we take for granted on more polished desktop environments like battery management, monitor management, etc. This allows me to move much faster via keeping my hands on the keyboard. i3 is also very configurable so I have a lot of control over exactly how my applications and workspaces are laid out. I know there are keyboard shortcuts that snap applications to the side on Windows, but it’s not nearly as powerful. I much prefer this style as opposed to dragging and dropping windows around to arrange my desktop how I like. Open another window, and each window now takes up half of the screen. In short, it means that your windows are automatically laid out in such a way that your screen is always full. If you haven’t heard of tiling window managers, you should check them out.

The biggest difference between i3 and the default GNOME desktop environment on Ubuntu 20.04 is that i3 is a tiling window manager. I hope that this post consolidates a lot of the information out there and makes it easier for someone to fully setup i3 in one go :) Why Use i3?īefore we dive in, I think it’s prudent for me to explain why I chose to use i3. I did all of the following configuration on Ubuntu 20.04, so I cannot speak to other versions/flavors of Linux. In this post, I will outline some of the more advanced configuration changes I made and point to some good documentation for getting started. I haven’t run this setup since college, so I had to re-learn (read: re-google) a lot of the solutions, tips, and tricks I found before that made my experience more pleasant. I also decided to use the i3 window manager. A few weeks ago, I started running Linux full time again (specifically, Ubuntu 20.04).

Easiest tiling window manager