+1 for i3. I have a 13" laptop as my primary driver and using i3 is so much faster & convenient on such a small screen. Though I have made 2 changes to my workflow to get better out of it:

- I use i3 inside XFCE. This allows me to use the xfce launcher, status bar, tray icons and other goodies, e.g. adding external monitor pops open the display properties, volume bar is available anytime. All this saves me from binding buttons & doing other changes in my i3 config.

- Since Win+{1,2,...0} (buttons which change workspaces in i3) are now hardwired in my brain, I have arranged the icons on the taskbar of my Windows-10 machine to what I have in i3.

Win+1 is assigned to Emacs on i3, so that's the first icon on my windows taskbar.

Win+2 -> shell/git bash

Win+3 -> Thunar/Windows Explorer

Win+4 -> Firefox/Firefox

Win+7 -> Anki/Anki

This saves a lot of brain cycles, as my Windows workflow is also a bit like what I usually use on Debian.

Last week I try using EXWM but wasn't able to make it work as per my expectations, so switched back to i3, but EXWM is definitely a TODO on my list.

4 / 5 window arrangements i use the same except Thunar. I dont remember why i choose that particular arrangement. Did you copy from some where ?

i3 inside XFCE? Sounds just like what I was looking for. How do you set that up?

+1 for i3. Tiling window managers dramatically increased my productivity. No more “where did that window go?” headache.

FYI, one line change each to your bashrc and inputrc will get you vi keybindings instead of emacs

That's interesting, I never knew that. I actually use Fish shell, and with my Colemak keyboard vi keybindings need to be remapped extensively (also why I don't use vim).

I use another niche keyboard layout (Workman) and have never really felt the urge to rebind anything in vi(m). I can definitely see wanting to rebind the standard nav keys which causes cascading changes and can cause you to lose a lot of the mnemonic advantages of the commands.

My solution to that issue is "just" alternate bindings which obsolete both the standard and vi navigation keys. At the home row, I have the arrow keys on my right hand and a "nav cluster" of my own devising (page up/down, tab left/right, workspace left/right) on the left.

Definitely not for everyone, but a possible way to have your cake and eat it too.

what's the change ?

bashrc:

    set -o vi

inputrc:

    set editing-mode vi

Now bash and anything using readline will use vi key bindings. This Just Works for most of the common cli tools, e.g. the python shell and psql, but there are exceptions. In the past, the mysql client hasn't respected these settings, and there's also a node library called vorpal that is reinventing readline, poorly and for no obvious reason.