i3: A tiling window manager

i3 is a tiling window manager for X11.

For more information about i3, please see the project's website and online documentation.

For information about contributing to i3, please see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Purpose of this repo

Vanilla i3 doesn't play that well with KDE/Plasma, that's why I'm maintaining this repo.

Branches

• stable: the stable branch of the official i3 repo which the patches are applied to.

• kde-master: that's what you want if you want to use i3 with KDE/Plasma (forked from https://github.com/sLite/i3 and maintained here by me).

• kde-wm-icons-master: My personal branch with some extra stuff merged like window-icons patch from https://github.com/laur89/i3-extras or a PKGBUILD for Arch packaging.

I will sometimes rebase kde-master and kde-wm-icons-master to update with the official i3 repo.

Features

• Proper handling of KDE/Plasma desktop (_NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_DESKTOP)
• Proper handling of KDE/Plasma popups and floating panels (mostly widget stuff) (_NET_WM_STATE_STAYS_ON_TOP)

i3-config

No special settings needed according to my knowledge, it works OOTB.

You can find these following config lines interesting for more integration:

# KDE Logout prompt on $mod+Escape
bindsym $mod+Escape exec --no-startup-id "qdbus org.kde.ksmserver /KSMServer logout 1 2 3"

# Compositor
exec --no-startup-id picom

# Kill the KDE system tray if you want another system tray
exec --no-startup-id killall xembedsniproxy

KDE config

Create ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/wm.sh and fill it with:

# Disable KWin and use i3 as WM
export KDEWM=/usr/bin/i3

Then chmod +x ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/wm.sh

Credits

• Michael Stapelberg for this awesome project, and all the contributors for their work.
• Marius Muja for his KDE fixes on earlier versions of i3.
• sLite for his KDE patches on current versions of i3.
• Mickaël Thomas for his window icons patch.