i3 window manager on Dell XPS 13" with QHD+ and Ubuntu 18.04

Having few spare days over the holidays I decided to switch my Dell XPS 9360 workstation from Gnome Shell to i3wm.

I chose i3wm amongst following tiling window managers:

• awesome
• xmonad
• i3wm
• qtile

Pretty much all of them seem to be a good choice but i3wm’s documentation is too good to not to try it. Xmonad requires to be familiar with Haskell, qtile is written in Python and awesome uses Lua which I generally dislike.

My requirements

• has to be bleeding fast
• all hardware function keys, suspend on lid close etc have to work like on gnome3
• short time from install to full productivity
• event-based if possible
• easy to set-up
• has to be compatible with my existing stack

My app stack

• spacemacs
• chrome
• telegram + signal + hangouts (yakyak) + slack
• terminal
• screenshot capture
• clipboard manager

The setup

You can find the config here: https://gist.github.com/wzin/61865931953081dd7a346ec9471296da

This is how it looks like during editing this post:

The bar on the top is the xfce4-panel which seems to perfectly integrate with i3 workspaces out of the box. I tried:

• polybar — install only from sources and I could not get rid of the problem where it could not find the fonts (despite the great documentation on how to debug all fonts problems)
• yabar — install only from sources
• i3status — really fine but I wanted someting more sophisticated. This will be my default choice if xfce4-panel will not work in the long run

Somehow the assign directive in i3 could not move windows into workspaces so I used for_window rules instead

I use nitrogen as my wallpaper manager. It rotates the wallpapers randomly from a directory.

i3 has great and simple way of launching programs by pressing command (or whatever key you want to bind as Mod1) + D. You just press command + D and a “search-as-you-type” menu appears.

Other minor features:

• I use redshift to manage the color temperature of my screen. The redshift.sh file contains only “killall -q redshift ; redshift” so the procs don’t stack up
• Touchpad indicator makes the natural scrolling possible when you start it up everytime i3 starts
• Power management is done through xfce4-power-manager which handles locking/unlocking of the screen on lid open/close. You can still lock the desktop using cmd + l

Last but not least — the DPI. Since i3 uses the ~/.Xresources file, you cant put many X rules there. One of them tells i3 what DPI it should use. In my case it’s as following

wojtek@seriousbusiness:~$ cat ~/.Xresources

native 280 dpi

Xft.dpi: 180