Help with i3wm

stratacast1

stratacast1

So I've reached my wits end with Linux I think and I don't care what software I'm giving up, I just need a working, stable workstation. Because of this I am also thinking about giving up on KDE Plasma 5, as much as I love it. I have my eyes set on i3 and just having the basics for UI so every thing is just simple and works. I already have FreeBSD 11.1 set up on extra box and it's all set up with if, i3status, i3lock, dmenu. I then ran 'startx' and I got my blank desktop with the prompt asking what my mod key will be, and I chose L_ALT. I also copied over the ~/.config/i3/config to ~/.i3/config.

So here is where my issues begin. I can do Alt+Enter and get my screens right away. However, nothing else really seems to work. I assume this is just an ultra barebones config file perhaps, because Alt+num will not create a new workspace for example, and it doesn't appear any shortcut works (close application, switch workspace), but Alt+D works to open dmenu. So what am I missing here? Is there a lot of configuration that is needed out of the box for i3 on FreeBSD? My other thought is there could be something really wrong with my keyboard layout. I have a TKL keyboard using basic English QWERTY with a standard ANSI layout.

Much help is appreciated on this, also I am open to opinions on other environments and why you like it. For me, I do a lot of terminal work, coding, photo editing, audio processing and virtualization (typically with VirtualBox)
 
i3-config-wizard should be considered broken on FreeBSD since it generates an incomplete config file (see PR 208069). i3 works fine otherwise.

You have to copy /usr/local/etc/i3/config to ~/.i3/config to get started.
 
For some reason you always get only half of the configuration file at the first start, which causes things to not work as expected. The solution is to copy the configuration by hand the first time.
 
Yup that solved the issue! Although I found that despite i3 being good, the one thing that wouldn't work out too well for me is the fact that autotype with keepassxc would not work as well as a couple other quirks. So I'll probably look at OpenBox or consider MATE or XFCE and use a full DE
 
lebarondemerde said:
I use x11-wm/bspwm and it works fine with security/keepassxc; however it is slightly more complicated to configure than x11-wm/i3.

Anyway, I am using security/keepassxc with the new browser plugin, the old one is deprecated.
Click to expand...

Do you tile keepassxc or are you able to have say, full screen Firefox, do something like alt+tab to keepassxc, paste into the window and resume work? I ask because I use keepassxc on all my workspaces and it wouldn't be my favorite to have to always have it open in a tiled mode
 
stratacast1 said:
Do you tile keepassxc or are you able to have say, full screen Firefox, do something like alt+tab to keepassxc, paste into the window and resume work? I ask because I use keepassxc on all my workspaces and it wouldn't be my favorite to have to always have it open in a tiled mode
Click to expand...

You can assign the keepassxc window to floating mode. It will float above the tiled windows. I usually send keepassxc into i3's scratchpad which is very handy.
 
Personally, I realy like i3wm, it makes for a real nice, lightweight desktop, and with some fiddling you can make it look really pretty too. I would recommend it to anyone who is at all interested.
 
Thanks for this information. Before installing this window manager, I decided to sneak into this forum. This way of solving the mini problem was very useful for me and saved time.
 
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