Hello All!
I just switched from Notion to i3 about a month ago. In general it's
been a positive experience, I especially appreciate the smaller
configuration file, the more sensible default bindings, the ability to
put windows in a tree (if that's the correct word).
After settling in, I made a quick list of some issues I ran into and
wanted to report back to the developers.
- As a user of the Dvorak keyboard layout, I was confused by the
result of running i3-config-wizard. I can see how h,t,n,s could be
used for navigation, but many of the remaining key bindings don't
make sense - why should 'd' split horizontally, or 'p' restart? This
wasn't really explained to me through the process of installing and
trying out the software. I ended up having to revert most of the
bindings to the Qwerty defaults. I think the wizard made things more
difficult in the end.
- Coming from Notion, I would have expected the default window layout
to be tabbed. At first I thought that i3 didn't support a tabbed
layout, because when I first started it (with killall notion; i3), I
ended up with 10 unusably-narrow windows. I still don't know how to
make tabbing the default - when I open windows on a new workspace,
they always come up split. If I kill and restart i3, then everything
comes up split (and uselessly narrow).
- I had to ask the IRC channel for the name of the key binding to turn
a dialog box into a window - perhaps the documentation should be
improved so new users can avoid this hurdle (e.g. under TERMINOLOGY
in the man page, there could be an entry explaining that a "Floating
Window" is something like a dialog box).
- Even after learning the "floating toggle" binding it sometimes
becomes annoying or confusing to have to press it each time - for
instance if I have to print a lot of stuff in Firefox, but I
sometimes want to navigate to other windows when the print dialog is
open. I also sometimes accidentally turn Firefox into a floating
window when I'm doing this, and then I wonder where all the other
windows went I would appreciate an option to have dialogs always
come up as windows by default.
- "focus right" is not always the reverse of "focus left". For
instance, if the rightmost tab is split horizontally, then one
command will cycle through all the windows, but the other will get
stuck cycling through the children of the tab which has been split.
Same with "focus up" and "focus down" in the stacking layout, when a
child is split vertically. It seems it would be cleaner to have
these pairs be strict opposites.
- I like that "i3-nagbar" is available to display error messages, but
I don't know how to close it with my keyboard... seems like I have
to use my mouse to close it. I'd prefer to avoid the mouse...!
Well, I hope this isn't too much stuff at once. I'm happy with i3 so
even if you don't fix any of these problems, I'll still use it. As I
mentioned above, I just wanted to report back since it's not always
easy to anticipate how new users will experience a piece of software.
Thanks for all your hard work in developing i3!
Best wishes,
Frederik
