[muuck]

I'm curious why you choose i3 over Awesome or Xmonad. I recently started playing with tiling window managers myself after I saw a i3 presentation on Youtube. When started looking into it I found much more documention on Awesome wm. That's why installed that one on my machine.

[siddboots]

I've been using i3 for about two years. I sampled a few other tiling WMs, including awesome, before settling on i3. Realistically there isn't much difference between them in terms of the features that I personally use, but these are the main things that sealed it for me:

* Tree-based/hierarchical tiling.

* Simple as hell multi-monitor.

* Beautiful config file [1].

* JSON API [2]

* Modal, vim-like key bindings.

[1] http://code.stapelberg.de/git/i3/tree/i3.config [2] http://i3wm.org/docs/ipc.html

[m_ram]

I haven't used i3, but I did use awesome for about a year before settling on Xfce. The thing all the tiling window managers don't have is a compositor. I don't care about shadows or animations, but it makes everything seem smoother and faster. The compositor in Xfce uses xrender instead of opengl, so it works pretty well even on low-end machines.

[ims]

Wish there was a cool reason to tell you, but it was just because somebody happened to be extolling the virtues of i3 in a similar HN discussion a few months back, so I gave it a whirl. I'm sure Awesome and Xmonad are great too, but all my needs are met so haven't really had a reason to shop around.

Looking back on all the hours I used to spend tweaking and fiddling with configs for things that I no longer use has made me sort of a setup minimalist -- anything that's not broken for me usually stays pretty close to stock these days.

[bitwize]

Awesome is nice, but is much more heavyweight. It depends on Lua, and the dialect of its configuration file changes.

i3wm has no such dependencies, covers 80% of awesome's use cases, and is stable.

[Bjoern]

What kind of things does Awesome excel at what i3 can't or doesn't do well? (Awesome user here)

[lake99]

I have dabbled with many WMs, including i3. I have settled on awesome. These are the shortcomings of i3 for my usage.

1. Multimonitor. i3 has 9 tags that are shared between all attached monitors. So, if you have 3 monitors, the distribution of tags may turn out to be [1,4,5,6], [2,8], [3,7,9]. You can move tags from monitor to monitor, but AFAIK, you can't exceed 9. I have a habit of keeping email, browser, music player, and chat program on one tab each. So, this limitation of 9 tags just kills it for me.

2. awesome has better placement of floating windows.

3. Vertical task/status bar. This is a minor issue, but I wish i3 comes with one.

If i3 fixes these things, I'd switch to it in a heartbeat. i3 has a saner config, and a much more elegant tiling layout.

[bitwize]

You can certainly have more than 9 tags on i3. In fact you can have tags with arbitrary names. They are a bit more difficult to manage with the default config, because only the default 9 have keybindings. But you can create your own tags and bind keys to assign windows to them or switch to them with a custom config.

You can also use a tabbed window layout (Super + E) to keep multiple programs full-screen on one tag. Then you can switch between them with the tabs at the top or Super + J, Super + ;.

[sciurus]

What do you think is lacking in i3's documentation?

http://i3wm.org/docs/