Arch Linux

Mr Pink57

Member

From: a van down by the river

Registered: 2009-05-30

Posts: 91

dwm to i3

Who has made the switch?  I have been using dwm for many years and I have seen some screens and it seems fun.  Sorry if it's a bit vague just want to get some impressions of the WM.

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kcirick

Member

Registered: 2010-06-21

Posts: 364

Re: dwm to i3

I've been going back and forth between dwm and i3. Here are my thoughts:

- dwm source code is much simpler (~2000 lines), so it's a lot easier to understand and hack
- dwm organizes the clients using master/stack concept. i3 on the other hand uses containers (and table). I prefer containers because you can have arbitrary amount of columns/rows.
- i3 bar shows only current and occupied tags, whereas dwm shows all of them).
- i3 uses randr, dwm uses xinerama

Again, I've been playing around with both dwm and i3's source code and going back and forth, and I really don't have a preference between the two, and I think both are very good WM.

I'm not sure if this helped you at all...

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moetunes

Member

From: A comfortable couch

Registered: 2010-10-09

Posts: 1,033

Re: dwm to i3

i3 was one of the first tilers I tried and being a manual tiler it needs some more work to do some things. I now use dwm which seems easier to use for what I want. You'll have to try i3 to see if manual tiling fits how you want to do things.

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Inxsible

Forum Fellow

From: Chicago

Registered: 2008-06-09

Posts: 9,183

Re: dwm to i3

I switched from dwm to i3, for two reasons,

1) I needed manual tiling because I didn't want to be boxed in in a default layout.
2) I was getting tired of compiling for even a small config change (when I switched, my computer wasn't the fastest beast on the block, so it took a lot of time)

dwm-sprinkles wasn't around at the time (or at least i didn't know about it), but it seems that sprinkles has a lot of patches but its also quite heavier.

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markbabc

Member

Registered: 2010-11-06

Posts: 157

Re: dwm to i3

I actually went from I3 to DWM for a very simple reason: I didnt like I3's default tiling style and i didnt want to sit there and code it into the config when there was a MUCH better choice out there (DWM)