i3wm: Jump Start (1/3)

hello everyone my name is Alex and invest screencast I'm going to help you get up and running with ìfree first of what is I free I free is a window manager for Linux what is a window manager you might be asking well a window manager is software the controls of placement and appearance of windows every system has a window manager what makes I free particularly interesting is that it is specifically a tiling window manager rather than trying to explain what that means I'll show you if I open a window for example the terminal window you can see that it automatically fills all of the available screen space so there's absolutely no wasted screen space it's all working space when I open a second window the screen space is splits evenly among the two windows I convened switch between window one time window two when I open a third window window three the screen space is split evenly again at this point I'm kind of running out of horizontal screen space so I can start to insert windows vertically for example I can insert window 4 down here at this point it should be fairly obvious why is referred to as a tiling window managers the windows are effectively tiled in such a way that no window covers and never even though I 3 is predominantly a tiling window manager it's also possible to stack windows like this and then flick between the various windows stacked at the top you can also then go back into the floating mode you can even tab windows like this is sort of tab like in a browser and then go back to the floating window mode also as you can probably appreciate some windows would look a bit ridiculous if you maximize them for example dialogues look at this password dialog imagine if it was maximized it would look quite disproportionate it's for that reason but I free also supports floating windows which is something most of you are familiar with from your experience with other operating systems because most operating systems have a floating window manager throughout this clip I used a whole bunch of keyboard shortcuts and didn't really tell you which keyboard shortcuts I'm using that's because this isn't the tutorial parts of the video that was just a quick demonstration to explain what I free is so that those of you who are interested in it continue watching in the next clip I'll take a clean installation of Ubuntu and show you how to install i3 on Ubuntu but bear in mind you can install ìfree on virtually any Linux distribution once I free is installed I'm going to show you specifically which keyboard shortcuts to use to do some of the things that I've showed you in this clip okay everyone I'm currently on a clean installation of Ubuntu I'm going to login to the desktop and then install I free which I can do by firstly opening the terminal and writing in sudo apt-get install i free i'll be prompted to enter my password and to confirm enter my password and press y for yes and just like that i free will begin installing once the installation has complete you can log out and then from this menu here you can choose I free to be your desktop environment when you log in again you'll be prompted to configure I for you for the first time firstly you'll have to tell I free wherever or not you wanted to generate a configuration file I recommend that you press ENTER for yes secondly will ask you to choose your mod key now the mod key can either be the Windows key or the Alt key and it contributes to the keyboard shortcuts but you'll use when you use I free I recommend you choose the Windows key but if you want to choose the Alt key just use your arrow keys to navigate up and down and then hit enter and just like that you're in the I free desktop before I jump in and show you guys the basic commands I want to help her some of your minds at ease looking at I free now it looks pretty regressive and frankly pretty ugly but don't fret out-of-the-box yes I free does not look very good however it's incredibly customizable in this video we're going to look past the aesthetics and focus on the functionality in a subsequent video call it part 2 if you like I'll show you how to configure your system and how to theme your system to look a bit more like the one you saw at the start of this video with that out of the way the first thing I'm going to show you how to do is open the terminal now because opening the terminal is something you do so commonly in Linux there's a built-in keyboard shortcut for it namely mod an answer now when I refer to referring to the windows key or the Alt key depending on which key you chose when you configure dye-free when you first load it to close the window press mode shift and qq4 quids to open an application aside from the terminal firstly press the mod + D this will open up an application called D menu it's this black bar of its alt of a little search input in the top left-hand corner invite input you can search for the program you want to load for example Firefox hit enter and the application will load to close that window you press the same key binding as you did for the terminal namely mode Shift + Q remember it's q4 quit there are a lot of key bindings and I free to be honest and it can be a bit daunting thinking about how you can possibly remember them all well most of them are pretty intuitive especially when you think about the letters in terms of their actions for example thinking of Q as quit next I'll show you how to tile windows so first of all let's open the terminal application by pressing modern answer say I want to create a second terminal and I want to tile it to the right-hand side I simply press mode and enter again to open a second terminal I free will automatically tile the windows and it will continue to do this infinitely at which point it starts to look a bit ridiculous so I'll close most of the terminals and now vitamin was out of horizontal screen space I'm going to insert a window vertically to do that I'm firstly going to press mod + B this tells I free but the next window that you open should be inserted vertically first but now when I press modern answer it's open the terminal is inserted vertically right now the window in the bottom right has focus I know this one because the cursor is flashing and - because the border is blue which indicates that that window has focus but say I want to move to another terminal but what I could do is I could take my hand and use my mouse and whichever window the cursor is under will gain focus so for example I can give focus to this window and start typing however it's a bit of a pain to have to keep reaching for the mouse I'd much rather stay on my keyboard and that's entirely possible in i3 if you want to move between windows using the keyboard firstly press and hold the mode key then press the arrow key in the direction that you want to go so for example I want to give focus to the window above the currently focused window so I'll press and hold the mode key and press the up arrow key to move to the left I'll press the left arrow key to move to the left again I'll press the left arrow key again all while holding the mode key it's all pretty intuitive the only thing I'll mention at this point there might be a little bit advanced for some of you is that you could optionally use the JKL or semicolon keys instead of the arrow keys do me a favor and look at your keyboard the j k l and semicolon keys are in a very central position on your keyboard which means they're very quick to access in fact they're on the home row and in general people seem to think that the home row is the most convenient place for keys to be if you've ever used the BIM attitude before these key bindings will seem really familiar to you if they seem a bit too esoteric and like they're not really worth using but don't worry about to just stick to the arrow keys from this point on I'm only going to mention the arrow keys but understand that whenever I mentioned the arrow keys you could optionally use the JKL or semicolon keys at the start of this video I showed you you could put the windows and they sorts of stacking mode or a tab mode I'm going to show you that again but this line with commentary about which key bindings I'm using to make this simple I'm just going to close the two rightmost windows now to put these windows in a stacking mode I press and hold the mode key and s has the stacking and then to flick between the tabs at the top there I press and hold the mod can use the up and down arrow keys if I want to put the windows back into the tiling mode I can press and hold the mod and a key and that will take it back to the tiling mode to go into the tab mode I press modern W and then flick between the tabs using the arrow keys while holding the mod key so that's mod and writes and rewrite modern left to move left and then if I want to go back into the tiling mode I'll press modern e me personally I only ever really use the tiling mode but your workflow may differ so it's worth mentioning nonetheless something else you may find yourself wanting to do is resize windows to make one window larger than another say for example I want to make this window on the left here wider well to do that I must first enter resize mode which I can do by pressing and holding mod and then thing are and as you can see in the bottom left we have a red box with the text resizing it which indicates that we're in resize mode here I'll press escape to exit resize mode that red box disappears and watch carefully as I press mod and R again to answer resize mode when you're in resize mode you can simply press the right arrow key to make the window bigger and the left arrow key to make the window smaller what I really need to say is you should press the right arrow key to make it wider and the left to make it narrower because you can also make the windows taller or shorter if you have vertical windows now it might seem like because we're pressing the right arrow key that is making the window bigger in that direction but really is a predefined key if I go to the right hand side window and to resize mode and then press the right arrow key it makes it bigger in the left direction so don't get confused by that another thing you might be interested in is how to move the windows about so say for example I have terminal 2 on the right hand side here and terminal 1 on the left hand side here and say I wants a move terminal one to the right well to do that I press and hold mod shift and then press the arrow key in the direction that I want the window to go so I want this window to go to the right hand side so I press the right arrow key and lo and behold terminals one is on the right I want to move it back I press and hold mod shift and then press the left arrow key this will become a lot more obvious if I introduce a third window terminal 3 and say I want to put this on the right hand side because it's obviously going to read 1 2 3 I just simply press mode shift and the right arrow key for the sake of completeness I'll also show you that if you have a vertical window which I can create by pressing modern V and then modern answer you can move this window above by pressing and holding mod shift and then the up arrow key mode shifting the down arrow key to move it back it's really pretty intuitive let's close all these windows by pressing mode shift + Q the next feature I want to show you is workspaces and whilst virtually every operating system now has workspaces I think they are especially powerful and I free for reasons that I'll explain in just a little bit first though I want to show you the basic idea so workspaces simply are an easy way to group a set of window say for example you have a couple of terminals open and you might be writing some commands in this terminal while running a script and the other for example and then you think oh I want to check the documentation you open up Firefox by pressing modern D and then entering Firefox and you've kind of ran out you see the window is just too narrow to read most web sites so at this point you're looking for a sort of maximize but certainly like I want to make this window full screen there is no maximize button and I free what you really want to do is poke the browser on its own workspace to do that give the window focus and then press and hold modern shift and then press at the number of the workspace that you want to move the active window to for example I'll move this window to works-based number to watch in the bottom left but number one indicates but I'm currently on workspace 1 but as I press mode shift + 2 it creates a second workspace firefox has moved there is no longer on works-based than but born and then to go to that workspace I just pressed mod + 2 and that takes me to workspace number 2 say I want to move it back again and make sure that Firefox is focused and then I press mode shift + 1 to move it back to the first workspace the workspace is empty now if I move to workspace number 1 you can see the 2 is removed from the bar because it no longer exists you know one thing I struggled with when I first started using i3 was adapting to this mental model is quite radically different than anything I've used before and it does kind of go against the grain of what you've probably used in your experience with computers so it does take a little bit of time to get used to but once you do it is tremendously powerful and I'll show you why on my other computer so here we are back on my personal computer the key bindings are going to be exactly the same but what I really want to do is take this opportunity to demonstrate how powerful the workspace is an ivory can be I'm using my system because I've obviously configured it in a way that facilitates my workflow so looking at the bottom left you can firstly see that all of my workspaces of icons I'll show you how to do that in the next video you can see the workspace number one has a browser icon as you can probably imagine if I go to that workspace by pressing mod + 1 it's there for my web browser I can do my general browsing in here and if I want to open a second window I often open incognito window on the right hand side like this so I can invalidate cookies for web development purposes looking at the icon for workspace number two you can probably guess for this is the workspace for my terminals I have three terminals open right now one for them which is a co-editor one for my test Runner and one but I just have as a sort of general purpose command line for using things like gate or listing things on the file system on workspace number four I've got OBS Rene you see now this workspace has a question mark because whilst works based on the one I always use for the browser and workspace number two I always use for my command lines workspace for could be anything workspace 9 however has got a chat icon because it's exclusively used in my chats applications and works base number ten is exclusively used for my music player at the moment it's Spotify something that I think is incredible and this goes beyond just the basic functionality is to say I quit out of Spotify and go back to workspace number one I no longer have that workspace I open Spotify look how it comes back again I've configured ivory in such a way that some applications automatically load on a particular workspace the reason why I think this is powerful is because I always know exactly where my windows are if I want to get to the browser as quickly as I can think I want to be in the browser I can press the mode key in one and I know that that's going to take me there I have confidence but that's where it will take me on other floating window managers I would often have to press the Alt + tab key to flick between windows or use the activity overview or might have to sort of move windows around because the window could be hidden behind it another one there's something about I free for me that makes it so that I can express my intent very clearly and it's a very pleasurable experience honestly I find it very satisfying with that out of the way let me quickly go back into the clean installation of Ubuntu and I'll show you couple more things before finishing up here ok so we're back in the virtual machine if this was my workspace I'd have Firefox here and I'd move these two terminals to workspace number two by pressing mode shift and then two as those windows are focused now a couple more things I'll Shaving I three first off if you want to log out what you need to do is press mode shift knee you'll see this orange title bar at the top asks you if you want to access you have to use your mouse button by default but you can if you want to configure it to use your keyboard if you want to lock the screen and this is the lot this has to be the last thing I'll show you I'll show you I'll tell you why in a second go to the terminal and type in I 3 log and this will bring an application called I free lock that basically makes your screen white or if you pass certain arguments to the application you can make it any color you want or even give it a background and then as you type in your password you get feedback to ensure that you're comfortable that you've actually entered the character you get answer it says verifying and then eventually or tell me if it's wrong I'll enter my correct password and oh actually logged me in this time I was just angling to say the last time I tried this on this particular machine and wouldn't let me login but it's working now so that is no matter what the last thing I'm going to show you though guys thank you very much for watching hopefully now you know enough commands you can start to install I free and then start using it for your daily purposes and get some first-hand experience at that point you can decide whether it's something you want to stick with I personally trialed it and loved it you know your mileage may vary by I hope you enjoy as much as I do thanks for watching guys hopefully I'll see you in the next video I'm going to show you how to configure I three to have things like custom key bindings and also make it look a lot nicer

Channel: Alex Booker

Views: 740,435

Keywords: GNU/Linux (Operating System), Linux Kernel (Software), Linux Distribution (Software Genre), Ubuntu (Operating System), Window Manager (Software Genre), i3, i3wm, i3 Window Manager, Operating System (Software Genre), Computer Keyboard (Computer Peripheral Class), Productivity (Literature Subject), Software (Industry), Tutorial (Media Genre), Help.

Id: j1I63wGcvU4

Length: 16min 42sec (1002 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/airblader]

Yeah, this has been posted here when it came out. :)

[u/Enock4seth]

It's super cool.

[u/slash_nick]

Thanks! I'm more or less up and running with i3 and friends but this filled in some gaps in my knowledge.

[u/Farkeman]

It's really well done.
Includes:

• setting up
• configuring
• ricing

[u/samzorn]

this list is useable too. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPvef-Dolyl9UFiezasutvYdB-7HNUjy6