i3 (window manager)

This article is about the X11 window manager. For other uses, see I3 (disambiguation).

i3

i3 with vim and terminals open
Original author(s) Michael Stapelberg
Initial release March 15, 2009 (2009-03-15)[1]
Stable release 4.12 / March 6, 2016 (2016-03-06)
Written in C
Operating system Unix-like
Size 965KiB[2]
Type Window manager
License BSD license[3]
Website i3wm.org

i3 is a tiling window manager designed for X11, inspired by wmii, and written in C.[4] It supports tiling, stacking, and tabbing layouts, which it handles dynamically. Configuration is achieved via plain text file and extending i3 is possible using its Unix domain socket and JSON based IPC interface from many programming languages.[5]

Like wmii, i3 uses a control system very similar to vi. By default, window focus is controlled by the 'Mod1' (Alt key/Win key) plus the right hand home row keys (Mod1+J,K,L,;), while window movement is controlled by the addition of the Shift key (Mod1+Shift+J,K,L,;).

Design goals

Compared to other tiling window managers

Floating pop-up windows

Even though i3 is a tiling window manager, specific windows such as password pop-ups are not displayed as new tiles by default:[6] they are stacked in front of tiled windows. These floating windows can be moved and resized freely, just like in popular desktop environments like GNOME or KDE.

Floating windows are intended by the authors of i3 to be used for pop-up windows only.[7]

References

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