Window manager thoughts

2025-04-15

Messing with i3, Openbox, and Xfce4

Listening to Youtube "influencers" I learned that I was a dummy because I don't use tiling window managers.

I tried i3 in Manjaro before but just didn't connect with it. Perhaps it was me? +Trying again I spent the past couple of days messing with the configuration files of i3, i3blocks, polybar, etc. +again, just to see if maybe I missed out on something.

Turns out I didn't.

My Thinkpad X220 is my daily drive, it has a 13" screen, 1366x768, and a French keyboard.

Splitting the screen is a daft idea on such a small laptop, it doesn't add any productivity improvement +even when you cast aside the problems remembering was it Super+~ or was it Super+Shift+F2 ?, +and the resulting digital gymnastics (although possibly good for my carpal tunnels, who knows?)

It's understandable when you have a nice large desktop screen and a decently sized keyboard, but here no way.

Anyway, a stacking windowmanager, Xfce4, appears to be the best bang for my buck teeth on this laptop.

I have set the keystroke Super+right & left to flip through windows that I mostly have maximised +(I'll eventually use devilspie to make this automatic), +that are all simply stacked on top of each other in the same workspace. +I use tabs in Ghostty to have for example Neomutt, btop, and a command line. In Librefox I have tabs too, +and I'll probably have Libreoffice Calc or Writer open, Gimp, galculator too.

Simple and effective, while keeping a bottom panel and application menu available.