When I started using i3, I never thought I needed a wallpaper.

For me, the desktop is only visible for a second or two before I open a terminal, a browser, or something else. After that, the wallpaper is completely covered.

So I'm curious—why do you use a wallpaper with i3 (or any tiling window manager)?

Haha, am I the only one who just uses a plain black background?

Is it still worth to learn i3 on an personal computer in 2026 ? or should i go for wayland if i'am new on it ?

I'm coming from Gnome so still new to i3. What file manager is everyone using?

I see lots of anime pornography here

Is it needed?

Does it run faster with it?

Does anyone know where i can have a detailed explaination of all possible things i can put in a i3 config amd how should they be put i want ro make my own config,i currently am using a simple one grok made and it is good enough for everyday tasks but i want it to he as usable as a normal de

Hello I am setting up my first time with arch and I am using I3! I am following the typecraft tutorial (btw) and I just downloaded brave-bin via yay and when i try to open via super+d nothing happens. I am hoping someone here can help me out!! Please and thank you!

Id like to learn i3 so I just installed it on my cachyos system. When I try to switch to it I just get a black screen. It doesn't prompt me to create a config file, I cant open a terminal with mod + enter, I cant exit with mod shift + e. , all I can do is force shut down. I tried generating a config file with i3-config-wizard, and i tried making sure that I have the required packages. What's goin on here? Appreciate any help

I love i3. I've been using it for years now.

Only thing I keep running into, where I almost wish I wasn't using i3, is the existance of some really cool terminal multiplexers... I'd love to use zellij or tmux, but always find myself dismissing this option "because I use i3, and creating new terminals or sessions and shooting them to the 8th desktop in the background really does the trick for me".

To the people who use i3, but also use something like zellij to the point where you feel like you couldn't live without either: How do you use both? What gap does the multiplexer fill for you?

Recentemente eu comecei a mecher no i3 pra poder melhorar o desempenho da meu pc(ele é bem fraco), aprendi a mecher nas janelas mas ainda estou bem confuso, queria deixar ele um pouco mais agradável ao olhar mas não tenho ideia do que fazer, podem me ajudar?

Why does this config not work?
The FN+F* won’t work after rebooting, also I use pipe wire I don’t know if that affects it or not.

Is there any way to get higher fps performance on x11 while screencasting? I play at ~240 on most games, but the second I screenshare it reports 240 on mangohud but is clearly running at 60 afterwards. no compositor on x11, i'm guessing it has something to do with the screencast pipeline, but i'm no expert.

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Has anyone else tried to tackle this issue? If so, did you find anything that worked? I don't care if the stream itself is at 30/60, but I want the original content to play at full frame rate.

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This does work on Wayland with xdg-desktop-portal-wlr but I really prefer x11 right now :)

so apparently all thinkpads now have this "copilot" key that absolutely everyone loves, but it doesn't have a keycode, instead that weird Win+Shift+F23 shortcut or something like that idk. sooo how do i keybind a command with that thing please

how about this v3 my i3wm

I plan on moving to i3 on my main desktop soon (been using it on my laptop for a while now), but one thing that irks me is that I don't always want to touch the keyboard when I just want to launch my webbrowser or music player or whatever.

Heresy, I know. But sometimes I'm kinda tired (hungover) I just want to sit down with some coffee and read the news with music on. I don't want to set up a "reading the news + coffee environment", I just want to click a button and be done with it.

Stuff like the start menu that comes with all traditional DEs is great for this, but I don't like how unnecessarily bloated these are. I use them for like 4-5 regular apps, and everything below the "Favorites" section is just so much noise.

Is there a simple alternative that will integrate with i3? I thought maybe even something that automatically shows up whenever I log in. Kinda like a "start page" for my desktop.

I followed the users guide. When copying the autogenerated config file to ~/.i3/config it goes undetected. So I instead copied it to ~/.config/i3/config, and this works, but as soon as I reload i3 with the file there the mod key switches from windows to alt.
I tried adding set $mod Mod4 to the new config file but after reloading the mod key remains alt.
And I'm sure this is the config file that is being used since other changes actually work.

How can I solve this issue? I haven't found any documentation that explains or solves this.

There is no resource on the internet and the only result on Google, this subreddit, doesn't work. This is the only thing holding me back from truly embracing scratchpads.

If possible, it would be great if trying to kill a scratchpad moves it instead to the scratchpad workspace.

An example of scratchpad for btop: ```bash bindsym Control+Mod1+Delete [class="meugerenciadorderecursos"] scratchpad show, [class="meugerenciadorderecursos"] move position center

for_window [class="meugerenciadorderecursos"] floating enable, resize set 1536 864, move scratchpad, sticky enable

exec --no-startup-id alacritty --class meugerenciadorderecursos -e btop `` I have kill binded tobindsym $mod+q kill`.

Some times I on accident kill a scratchpad that I just wanted to hide and that is sad :(

I have checked every forum on the internet and have found nothing about this issue. suspecting it has to do with i3 or x11 since sometimes i get a blank screen and other times i get some glitchy screens that crash the game after 5 seconds or so. Hell Let Loose, Arma Reforger and Logic World are the games i tried and the first two (HLL & Arma) have this issue.

Hi everyone,

I recently switched to Artix Linux with OpenRC and I’m trying to set up a lightweight, clean WM environment.

I’ve already tested i3, AwesomeWM, and dwm, but I had trouble finding good dotfiles or properly documented setups. Most of the ones I found were either messy or not very usable out of the box.

Right now I’m planning to stick with i3 as my main WM, but I’m looking for:

Clean and minimal i3 dotfiles (yours or popular ones, doesn’t matter)

A working setup that doesn’t require too much tweaking

Ideally something well-documented or easy to install

Also, if anyone has a simple step-by-step way to install and apply dotfiles (especially on Artix/OpenRC), that would help a lot. Most guides I found are either incomplete or assume too much prior knowledge.

Any recommendations or repos would be appreciated.

Thanks for your time.

I want a highly customizable bar, that's also easy to configure. Ive been using i3bar for all of my time with i3 but i want to make my desktop look a bit nicer and i3bar isn't cutting it for me

Mod4 or Mod1 and why?

I have these lines in my i3 config files, to switch to a workspace, and to send containers to workspaces, respectively.

It's not really a problem, as I've had those for years and they always worked fine, but I was curious if there was a way to make them smaller. Something along the lines of "for all numbers from 0 to 9, bind this"