I actually like it this way. I moved from i3 to AwesomeWM years ago, which basically has a bunch of pre-defined layouts. It's incredibly convenient, imo. Not sure what's complicated about it. I just hope it has hotkeys that let you switch layouts and it can assign the windows automatically (or remembers previous assignments). Otherwise it would be tedious.

edit: Just checked. It has a hotkey to switch between saved layouts. And you can set it so a newly opened program goes to its last known zone. That's pretty cool. I'll have to try it.

Ahh that's pretty cool. I've never used Awesome, so my experience is biased.

In my opinion, the major disadvantage of current tiling WMs like i3 is that they don't make effective use of the mouse, which can be a very efficient input device for some usages.

If this product is able to change that, then that could outweigh the pain of the awkward configuration for me.

Regarding the mouse... thats the entire point of i3, i.e. to make it all keyboard-driven.

It's sort of like saying "the problem with cars is that they don't make effective use of the horse".

i3 doesn't do anything to prevent you using the mouse for whatever application you like.

The point is to use the mouse for window management not just on the applications. Now, i haven't used i3, but from a tiling window manager i'd expect at minimum that i can drag-drop windows with the mouse between "zones" and resize the zone boundaries interactively with the mouse.

For extra stuff i'd like using the wheel up/down on a title bar to minimize/restore a zone, drag-dropping a window over another window to create a zone made out of tab-like title bars, ctrl+clicking multiple titlebars to select multiple windows (so that, e.g, drag-dropping them to another zone would put all of them as tabbed windows in there or being able to close all of them either via a shortcut or via a popup menu command, and/or commands to merge them in one tabbed zone, or split tabbed zone(s) to individual zones), right clicking on a zone separator to offer a popup with commands to split/merge the zone, move the splitter at some specific percentage, etc, drag-dropping one or more windows at the edge of the screen to create a new zone (or set of zones for multiple windows).

There are so many things you can add with a mouse, especially if instead of thinking of it as a car vs horse you think of it as what it actually is: an additional input device that is right next to your keyboard and unlike the keyboard it provides precise analog input for 2D motion.

As a starting point you can check what pretty much every IDE with support for tiling does (e.g. the recent versions of Visual Studio - not VSCore, the real one).

i3 has mouse support, you can resize windows (by default i believe it is mod + right mouse button), and i am fairly certain drag and drop will make it into the next release, if you want to use it there's already a PR on github to test it out.

Interesting to hear, thank you for the information.

i3 isn't really a Windows click-click-click style UI; you do most everything with the keyboard, including % based resizing, converting tiles to tabs or stacks, moving tiles from one section or virtual desktop to another, etc.

It's really quite a powerful and easily configurable tool, so much so that I consider it to be an absolutely indispensable part of my day-to-day computing experience (working on a Mac, for example, is just depressing in comparison).

But why? I think it would be hard to argue that the mouse isn't significantly more efficient for, e.g. resize operations than the keyboard. And you have one right there on your desk, don't you? Don't you find it to be a waste that it can't make effective use of all your input devices even in situations where they could provide advantages?

Decade-long user of i3 here, I have three different keyboards (netbook to server) and three different trackpads\mouses -- the keyboard is more efficient for resize operations. I use focus-follows-mouse (agreed, why not use all devices) and fling the cursor all over the place all the time, but don't have to click and don't even have to use my fingers if I can drag my lower palm across the trackpad.

Yes i know that i3 has a lot of keyboard shortcuts, i'm saying what i'd expect it to also have in terms of mouse support - it isn't an either "this" or "that", it is both :-). One doesn't exclude the other.

I understand that's a design goal of i3. I wasn't specifically talking about i3 though, in fact it seems like every tiling window manager has that philosophy and I think it is a mistake. Enabling effective use of the mouse doesn't negate the ability to use the keyboard effectively too -- they serve different use cases.

My mouse is actually critical to how I use i3 - I've got a lenovo thinkpad usb keyboard, with the left, middle, and right mouse buttons below the spacebar and the red nub for the pointer. I use focus-follow-mouse and when I need to change my active window I just flick the mouse over to where it needs to be - it's super fast. It also works really well with laptop trackpads and an actual mouse.

I know other window managers allow you to use focus-follow-mouse, but I haven't found any that make it nearly as effective as i3.

Would you mind elaborating on what use case you think a mouse could come in handy for when you would be using a tiling WM? I recently switched over to one and the only time I've used my mouse was when I had to click on something in Firefox.

The mouse could be convenient to resize or rearrange windows. For example, it would be nice if dragging one window onto another swapped them. I think that would be faster than swapping them with i3's shortcuts.

Alternatively you can use tridactyl to click on links with hint keys.

The mouse works great in Sway for resizing splits, moving floating windows, and changing window focus.

Interesting! Thanks for the recommendation