This may be considered blasphemy, but I continue to use i3-gaps on my 43" 4K monitor in 100% floating mode. It actually works quite well. Of course for my small displays I use tiling mode.

Imo if you're only floating, Openbox is even lighter than i3 and works great. Super configurable too- the config file is just XML. I really enjoyed my time on it but I like tiling too much. Window-snapping wasn't enough.

Ick.

I use xmonad, despite not knowing any Haskell. I basically just copy pasted little snippets from all over the place and changed random characters until it started working.

Pretty sure I still prefer this state of affairs to XML.

Why don't you use one of the olden and golden wm's for that? i3 doesn't have alt-tab

sure it does

    bindsym $mod+Tab exec --no-startup-id rofi -show window

Rofi is great, but it's still adding several extra keystrokes for something that alt-tab essentially does in 2 (alt, hold tab till you get to a window you want, release to go to it. on rofi, you'd have to press alt-tab to invoke the window dialog, then type a portion of window name or navigate down to it, then press enter) .

> (alt, hold tab till you get to a window you want, release to go to it.

madness :) I could never manage to get to my window like that, it's alt + tab tab tab tab tab tab tab until I get where I want when on windows vs alt + tab down down down down on rofi so I don't see a lot of difference

Haha, fair enough. Also turns out tab tab tab tab works on rofi -show window (my fault for not using it much hence not knowing) so maybe it's not all that different after all!

Does i3 allow you to easily toggle floating on each window (regardless of the main mode that new windows default to) like dwm?

Yes, shift-super-space is I think the default key binding to switch the current window.

That’s exactly what it is in dwm (except that dwm defaults to using alt as the MOD(ifier) instead of super, but changing that takes only a one line patch). And you can also just use MOD-leftmouse-drag to move a window or MOD-rightmousedrag to resize (either of which change the window to floating mode if it isn’t there already), or use MOD-middlemouseclick to toggle its floating state.

If you're only using the floating mode, I would recommend trying cwm.

Terminator is my window manager -> Ctrl-Shift-E / Ctrl-Shift-O .. (Ctrl-Shift-N / -P) ..

I still use terminator out of habit, but I never tile it anymore. Terminator can't tile my browser windows along with my terminal windows, and interleaving separate shortcuts (and window groups) defeats the purpose of tiling

Browser -> fullscreen. End of problem. Tabs in the browser window are the switch point.

Terminator isn't for everyone. But it can be for anyone.

I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying you always make the browser fullscreen? Tbh I think you might be missing the purpose of a tiling window manager

Oh sure, I get the point of tiling window managers .. its just that I rarely need to leave Terminator for anything besides the odd web document or so - and that context switch is, for me, quite helpful.

But I set up Terminator in full tiled rig for everything else, and rarely every leave it. Its a delight.