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by farresito 3831 days ago
I used to use bspwm, but ended up moving back to i3wm. While i3wm is not perfect, I always found it to be more practical than bspwm. The ability to stack, for example, is very nice. What's the thing that you really like about bspwm? As much as I wanted to really like bspwm, when it came to using it for work, I just found it lacked something.
2 comments

It just seems to resonate well with how I think about organizing my windows and I can predict its behaviour. For example, I almost always use manual mode when spawning new windows, so I can almost always predict how my desktop will look afterwards. I also _really_ like the dynamic configuration it provides through its client/daemon model (so you can try out different settings without changing your configuration file and restarting X), and the amount of commands that allow for fine tuning of bspwm's behaviour fits me very well since I like tinkering with it and create a configuration that does exactly what I want.
Curious, what issues do you have with i3?

Have been using it for a few years, really hits the sweet spot of easy-config + awesome functionality (stacked terminal windows with remote server load averages piped through title bar are a real nice-to-have for example). Floatable dock (i.e. scratchpad) is also pretty handy for skype, music player, notes, etc.

Only issue that's really bothered me is a minor one: with stacked windows you can't get the desktop background to show through properly with transparency enabled (via Compton or other compositor). Apparently that's been fixed in 4.11.

Anyway, no shortage of TWM options on Linux, everyone can have their (nearly) ideal setup ;-)

Well, I would like to have more control over the floating windows (that will never happen), for example.

One of the things I did like in i3 better than bspwm, for example, is resizing. Another big advantage is it works out of the box very well. Oh, another thing I remember now is i3 is more intuitive when moving things around the screen, especially when trying to switch between vertical and horizontal splits, at least in my experience. I can't really recall all the reasons. They were all small things that build up. I do run i3 straight from the git repository (next branch).

That said, in my experience, tiling wm are way ahead of other wm, especially if you are a programmer. I'm a big fan of vim and tmux (and vimperator for firefox, which adds vim-like behavior to it) and I have no mouse. I have a trackpoint, for whenever I need it.

With i3, I never found an easy way to swap two windows at different levels of the tree. With awesome or bspwm, I can just mod+drag. Also, automatic tiling in various layouts is nice.
I don't usually have complex layouts, and I really appreciate the stacking from i3, so in that sense i3 wins for me, but I guess if your layouts are more complex, you might appreciate bspwm power in that regard.