From Gnome Shell to i3wm

My work laptop is a little bit underpowered and Gnome Shell has been bothering me to no end, so I decided today to switch over to the tiling i3wm window manager. I have tried a few different ones in the past, but never stuck with them for some reason. I was feeling adventurous and fed up, so today felt like a good day to make the switch.

Following are the things I had to change to make my life work with i3wm. I will update this list as time goes on and I find more things.

• Install pcmanfm for file browsing. Sometimes it’s nice to have a visual understanding of what’s in my folders.
• Run ibus-setup and disable the “Next input method” keybinding. Ctrl-space is used in Emacs to set the mark, so this was really cramping my editing.

• Add the following lines to ~/.i3/config for my externa keyboard’s volume control:

  bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec /usr/bin/pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ -- '+10%'
  bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume exec /usr/bin/pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ -- '-10%'
  bindsym XF86AudioMute exec /usr/bin/pactl set-sink-mute @DEFAULT_SINK@ toggle
  

  These lines use pactl, PulseAudio’s command line interface, to raise, lower, and mute the system’s audio.

• Install the amazing rofi as an application switcher and launcher. I bound it to $mod+period and unbound the default dmenu binding of $mod+d.

Resources:

• http://i3wm.org/docs/refcard.html
• http://ninjaducks.in/hacking/gnome-3-to-i-3/
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23455761/set-mark-command-not-working-emacs-with-c-spc