[pmoriarty]

I'm a heavy user of both i3 and emacs.

I would never use emacs as a window manager, because it's simply not stable enough for me -- it crashes and hangs quite a lot, and I have to restart it from time to time when I update my configuration and want to test it out from scratch, or when emacs get confused after running it for a long time.

i3, by contrast, has been 100% stable for me, and I almost never have to quit or restart it. So it's completely reliable, and I don't ever have to worry about it not working.

Regarding i3's config, it's really easy, and except for occasionally telling i3 the title of windows I'd like to float by default, I haven't touched my i3 config in decades.

As for how I use i3, I mostly have one full window taking up the entire screen, with other windows in the background, as tabs that I can switch to. That's 99% of my use. Occasionally I manually make a window float, when I want some odd-sized window or want it to overlap another window, and some windows I make float by default. These floating windows are all very temporary. Sometimes I'll also change my tiling configuration so that more than one window appears on the screen at the same time, but that's also pretty rare, but it's there when I want it.

Overall, I'm much happier with a tiling WM than with a floating WM, because with a tiling WM I don't have to manually fiddle with window resizing, stacking, or positioning. 99% of the time i3 just automatically does the right thing without requiring any interaction from me.

It would be nice to use emacs for this, but it's just not nearly stable enough or reliable enough for me.

[nicolapcweek94]

This makes sense to me, looking for stability both in usage and in configuration. Emacs has been that for me, but I do use it for nearly everything for a very extensive configuration. As I understand it the idea is to look for the familiarity and consistency of using the same environment in the same way for all uses, which makes total sense if you haven't been putting stuff in your init.el for years.

Thanks for the POV!

[pmoriarty]

I have a very extensive emacs config myself (10's of thousands of lines worth), and try to use it for most everything as well. I'd love to use it to manage windows too, but, like I said, it's not nearly stable enough for me for that. I don't want my WM to freeze up when emacs does.