I’ve decided to reinstall the GNU/Linux system on my old X220 ThinkPad and in 2018 finally move on from UbuntuStudio 14.04 (Trusty). In the process of also trying out new Lubuntu (which I didn’t like for some quite aesthetic reason and retried with Xubuntu – much better!) I also decided to finally try i3 window manager. So I wanted to quickly layout just some of the differences, that are quite subjective.

Enjoying:

• windows grouped in a container with tabs
  
• minimalist configuration
• beautiful status/widgets bar
• hiding screen-edge window borders
• windows are actually fully using all pixels of the screen

Missing:

• I keep hitting (awesomeWM) shortcut to maximize a window. There’s no maximise window in i3.
  
• when there’s a floating window in otherwise tiled workspace, I cannot ‘hide’ that floating one
• cannot switch away from fullscreen window within a workspace (to a window otherwise behind that window
  
• There’s no minimize functionality
• snap to screen-edge or other windows in floating mode

(I might update some of the points above in the next few days, as I become aware of what the muscle memory is telling me)

So I think there are number of limitations in i3wm – at least for somebody coming from AwesomeWM, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. So these above are a moving target. I’m sure they will change as I will get used to features and non-features.

Credits

Huge thanks to Adhi Pambudi for sharing his setup as i3-starterpack!

Screenshot

update #1

In order to use xbacklight to change brightness of your screen, you need to add

into your xorg.conf.

Since by default there’s no xorg.conf on ubuntu, instead of creating one, I went this way: in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ folder I created a file called intel_backlight.conf and into it put the following:

Now, to use the Fn keys for brightness (on Home/End keys), into ~/.config/i3/config you put