🚧 🆕 This is a new page! Which alos means it is under construction

i3 is a tiling window manager designed for [X11](X Windows System) written in C. It can also do stacking like GNOME or KDE. I like to think of it as if tmux and X11 had a baby.

You'll obviously need the components for the X Windows system installed. I'll need to find out what list of things it needs first. The i3 guys were awesome to provide a list of prerequirements in a file called DEPENDS.

These packages are what are really needed.

debhelper libx11-dev libxcb-util0-dev libxcb-keysyms1-dev libxcb-xinerama0-dev libxcb-randr0-dev libxcb-icccm4-dev libxcb-cursor-dev libxcb-xkb-dev libxkbcommon-dev libxkbcommon-x11-dev asciidoc xmlto docbook-xml pkg-config libev-dev libyajl-dev libpcre3-dev libstartup-notification0-dev libcairo2-dev libpango1.0-dev libpod-simple-perl

which will also install a lot of other stuff.

Initially I wanted to install i3 from it's git rather than the binary, but then another alternative presented itself: installing the backport. A backport is basically a binary version of the latest software but it is still in the testing phase.

The good news is we can do a backport of this and not worry that we we are backporting everything else. So It's probably a good idea to install all that stuff in the previous section using the usual sudo apt-get install blah-blah-blah, but for this section you will need to do something special.

⚠️ SECURITY WARNING! Backports are not publicly signed like some packages. You will get a message that will say that some packages will not be authenticated. Just say Yes to them.

$ sudo bash -c "echo 'deb http://http.debian.net/debian jessie-backports main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jessie-backports.list"
$ sudo apt-get update
$ apt-get -t jessie-backports install i3

ℹ️ NOTE: Backports will only be used if -t jessie-backports is added to the apt-get command before install.

This will install

dunst i3-wm i3lock i3status libanyevent-i3-perl libanyevent-perl libasync-interrupt-perl libcommon-sense-perl libconfuse-common libconfuse0 libev-perl libguard-perl libjson-xs-perl libxcb-dpms0 libxdg-baseir1 suckless-tools xfonts-base

When it is done installing all that use vim to compose ~/.xinitrc

exec i3

Save it. Quit vim. Then startx.

The first time you run i3, you will be asked if you want to configure it. Say yes by pressing Enter.

It will then ask you which key to set as the $mod key. Most people will chose the Windows key, but since my Hacktop doesn't have one, I set mine to Alt. If you have internationalization set up, you may not be able to use AltGr. Select the key the press Enter.

That's it.

🔧 TODO: I need to get those parts set up.

• urxvt - I recommend using this for terminal
• [X Windows System](X Windows System)

• https://i3wm.org/
• https://github.com/i3/i3/
• https://wiki.freedesktop.org/xcb/
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/I3
• https://www.reddit.com/r/i3wm/