¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

I’m a huge fan of the i3 tiling window manager. It was the first ‘simple’ window manager I tried, and it is still my favorite one. It eases the management of your windows, is optimized for keyboard control, and maximizes all the space you have available, thus being a nice option for laptop users. i3 is packaged for most Linux and BSD distributions. You just have to install it through your package manager, then enjoy simplicity and agility. In this post I’ll share a couple of configurations and tweaks I use for my day-to-day computing and programming tasks on i3. First thing: the statusbar. My preferred one is i3blocks. A statusbar should be easy to config and tweak, and should not be bloated. Only the information you really care about should be displayed on it. Colors are also welcome, as they are a good design practice. Essential blocks include the battery of your laptop, the system load, the current date and time, and whether you are connected to the web or not. I also like to have a block which displays my current network speed (download/upload) and another one for system memory and swap. Optional things include volume and the currently playing song. Second thing: the background of your desktop. You’ll rarely see it, but it is nice to have something other than a black background fill color. feh is the best wallpaper setter for i3. A simple

feh --bg-scale '/home/thiago/Pictures/wallpaper.jpg'

sets your background image, and creates a $HOME/.fehbg shell script, which you can run to reload your wallpaper later on. Third thing: a i3lock which blurs the current view of your desktop is very nice. I like i3lock-wrapper from i3-extras repository by ashinkarov, available on GitHub. There are other interesting things there. j4-make-config is great for managing i3-themes, in the case you dislike the default one. It is available on http://www.j4tools.org/. Workspace management should be simple, so I don’t use names for them. Just numbers. When you use names, it becomes annoying when a given window is not in the proper workspace. While you can force them to go its proper place in your i3 config file, this process is more automatic than I need and it keeps getting in my way, so I decided it is better not to give names to my workspaces. If you use dual monitors, xrandr is your best friend. I like to have the following aliases in my shell rc file:

alias xrandr-t-hdmi-connect="xrandr --output LVDS1 --primary --output HDMI1 --auto --left-of LVDS1"
alias xrandr-t-hdmi-disconnect="xrandr --output HDMI1 --off"
alias xrandr-t-hdmi-mirror="xrandr --output LVDS1 --primary --auto --output HDMI1 --auto --same-as LVDS1"

arandr also helps when you need something a bit more advanced. Those set of configs makes me happy on i3. There are several more i3 customizations you can do, and I’ll leave a couple of references here. Other ones were already mentioned through the post.

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/I3
• https://i3wm.org/docs/

Having a good window manager, the next step is to achieve a good shell environment (urxvt + tmux + zsh). More on that later.