I don’t have to move my hand away from the keyboard to the mouse, increasing my productivity. I have mapped all the apps I use daily to keyboard shortcuts.

When you start using i3, you need to memorize a few of those shortcuts to get around and, with time, you will use more of them.

These include opening the terminal and other programs, resizing and positioning windows, changing layouts and workspaces, everything. I3wm uses keyboard shortcuts for different aspects of the environment. I love i3wm for a lot of reasons, and the first is that it’s very fast and lightweight and it does not hog down on system resources like other traditional desktop environments. There is no need to write it in some new language and then compile it for every little change in your configuration. You can configure it by editing plain text files. I have tried many tiling wm and settled on i3wm as it is the best mix of simplicity and customizability. Some famous tiling window managers are i3wm, awesome, xmonad, etc. In contrast, a tiling window manager is more like a drawing board divided into non-overlapping blocks where windows are displayed. They are based on the desktop metaphor that allows each program to be resized, reshaped, and overlapped. Earlier I used XFCE as it was reasonably efficient, but then I found i3wm, and it completely changed my workflow.Ĭompositing Window Managers, used in Microsoft Windows, OSX, Gnome, and KDE are the most popular Window Managers. I have been using Linux for quite a while now, but I was not satisfied with the default desktop environment choices available.

I3wm for macos