 If you're just getting started with Tiling Window Managers, i3 is probably the best one for you to start with. It's easy to configure, it's easy to install because it's in most distro's repositories, and it's just easy to use. But it's also configurable to the point where if you move past the point of your noobness, you can actually make it do a ton of great and cool things. If you're just getting into Tiling Window Managers and you've just installed i3, what I thought I'd do today is talk about a few things you should do immediately after installed that can make i3 work way better. So let's go ahead and jump in. Okay, so once you get into i3, this is probably what you'll see. Now you won't have this really weird error that won't go away for probably... I don't know what that's all about, just ignore it. But all you'll get is a blank screen with a bar at the bottom. You'll probably get a little pop-up at the beginning asking you to create a configuration file and to select the super key. Those are very easy to do. You just want to hit Enter and then Enter because you'll want to create a configuration file and you'll want the Windows key to be the super key. Now if you're one of those crazy fools who thinks that the Alt key should be the super key, then you would just hit the down arrow on that particular window and then hit Enter. I don't understand people who use the Alt key as their super key, but whatever works for you. So once you've got that you're here. What are some things that you can do to make i3 look better and function better? So the first thing you'll want to do in my opinion is change the terminal emulator. So in order to get to a terminal in i3 is super enter. Now in this case I'm in Ubuntu so it's opening up GNOME terminal. Depending on what distribution you're in, you may open up X-Term, you may open up URXBT. It's really going to be looking for whatever best terminal is available to you. Usually it's the only one on the system. Or it's the one that is used as a main emulator on another desktop environment. It's weird how it chooses. Sometimes it's one thing, sometimes another thing. But you'll want to change this unless you're comfortable with using GNOME terminal. I don't like GNOME terminal so I'm going to change it. So I'm going to zoom in here so that we can all see. I'm going to cd into .config if I can spell and then into i3. And then if we do an ls here we'll see that there's a config file. So all we have to do is vim into config and then we can go through and make some changes. So the first thing we'll want to do is scroll down here where it says i3 sensible terminal. Now on this install of Ubuntu I have the kitty terminal installed. So what I'm going to do is change this to kitty. So I'm going to change to the end of the line and I'm going to just write in kitty. And then we'll get out of insert mode and write and quit this. Now I believe that the stock keybinding to restart i3 is modshift R and it is. So now if I hit super enter, apparently I don't have kitty installed. So I have to sudo apt install kitty. There we go. I thought I had kitty installed. Apparently I don't. That just goes to show you what do I know. So now if we hit super enter we get kitty. So that is the first thing you should do when you install i3 for the first time is change to a terminal emulator that you enjoy, that you're comfortable with, or maybe that you have a configuration file already created for. So the next thing we want to do is quit out of this and we'll go back into our configuration file. So again we'll cdinto.config i3 and then we'll vim into the config file. And then what we're going to do is change a couple keybindings. So personally, now this is going to be a very personal selection. Whatever you're comfortable with in terms of keybindings is what you should do. But for me, super shift q does not work for closing windows. For me that's always been exit out of the window manager. That's what it's always been for me, but they don't use that in i3 for whatever reason. So what I'm going to do is just delete the shift part and we'll make it super q. And then what we want to do while we're in here at the same time is just scroll to the end. And then we'll get out of this bracket here and we want to do exec underscore always, nitrogen dash dash restore. Now right now that's going to do nothing at all because we don't have nitrogen installed. So it actually won't do anything. You don't know what nitrogen is. Nitrogen basically just allows you to set a wallpaper. Now there are a ton of different programs that allow you to set wallpapers. Nitrogen is just the one that I happen to prefer because it allows easy configuration of multiple monitors. But you could use something like fa or you could use something like, I think you could use sxiv in order to do it as well if you wanted to. But nitrogen is the one that I use. So what I'm going to do now is right and quit out of this super shift r. And now if I hit super q, this will actually close that window. Let me see if it'll actually close this thing too. It won't. I don't know what the error is. That's really weird. It has something to do with virtual blocks. Never mind. It doesn't matter. Okay. So now that we have that done, we can open up a terminal again and we'll zoom in again. And we'll do sudo apt install nitrogen. Okay. And then get that installed. Yes. And let that install for a second. Very quick and easy. And then we can quit this now. The next thing we want to do is actually find a wallpaper. So I'm going to open up Firefox here. So that's with the browser I have installed on this machine. And we will find a wallpaper. Cool wallpaper. Okay. I don't know why it's giving me phone wallpapers. It's really stupid. Google, you're atrocious. Size, large, medium and icon. Those aren't the sizes we need. Thank you very much. That's so stupid. Why can't I just select 1080p? And we'll just search for HD. Google is trash. And you're still going to give me these stupid wallpapers. It just won't work. Okay. So we'll find one here. It doesn't really matter. This one will work. Open image new tab. So you can tell it's been a while since we used Firefox. We're going to save image ads. We're going to save this in pictures. It's just signed. And it's going to save it as a stupid WebP file. I hate Firefox with a passion. Who gives a crap about WebP? It's a JPG. Just save it as a JPG file. Okay, man. It's all right. Cool down. It's all right. We'll just see if we can download it from the collection here. Actually, I like this one better. Printable PDF. That's an advertisement. Go away. Download wallpaper. And then save. That ended up being, you know, way more work than it needed to be. That was stupid. Firefox is dumb. So I think I, in terms of graphical file managers in this, I will have Nautilus. Okay. Which is, you know, a choice. So I'm going to close Firefox. We're done with that. Go away. Firefox. Never talk to me again. Okay. And then we're going to go to pictures. We have that. And it's actually not saved there. It's saved in downloads. Because, again, Firefox will cut this. And we'll go home and go to pictures. This is way more work than I thought it was going to be. Just to change the wallpaper. How many mats does it take to change the wallpaper? And then just paste. Okay. Now we can quit this and we can open up nitrogen. Nitrogen. Okay. And this is what nitrogen looks like out of the box. There's nothing here. So what you have to do, you have to go down here where it says preferences. And then you have to add the folder of some kind. So I'm just going to add pictures because that's where I stored that wallpaper. Wallpaper. And then just say, okay. And then we'll select this. And what we're going to do is zoom to fill. Click apply. And then we can quit this. And we've changed wallpapers. We have a wallpaper. So that's the next thing you should do when you install i3. Wallpaper doesn't make it function any better, but definitely makes it look better. So the next thing what you want to do is learn how to manipulate the bar. So the bar is configured in your configuration file. So if we open up this again, and we'll cdint.config i3 and then into config. And here at the bottom, we'll see that the bar is just the bar. And there's not a lot here in terms of coloring, nothing like that. So in order to get that code, the easiest way to do it is to actually go to another workspace here. We'll open up Firefox again, woohoo. And we will go to i3 window manager, wm, i3wm.org. And we'll click docs. And we'll click user guide. And we'll click. Let's see here. Let's zoom in a bit. Colors changing colors. There we go. This is what we want to do. So we want to copy and paste this part here. Go back to the next workspace. And inside the bar, inside this part here, we're in between the brackets. We just want to copy and paste that. Okay. And then we can go through and make changes to the colors, whatever we want. The border is going to be this border around the thing when a window is focused. The background is going to be the background of this tile. And the text in the foreground will be white for the text or whatever. And then you can just play around with the code. Now I'm not going to, I have a video on how to rice i3. It's kind of similar to what I'm talking about now. But if you want to get more details on how to exactly rice your i3 window manager, I'll point you towards that video there because it'll actually go more in depth than actually, you know, ricing things. Just know that if you want to make any changes to the bar color or the window color or anything, you'll need this. Actually, now that I'm thinking about this, this may not need to go into bar section. I was just remembering that it may very well need to go outside of the bar section. It does. I'm sorry about that. So if we just change this here and then just put it outside the bar, that'd be better. I think that's right. Well, I mean, we can find out very easily. Just we'll change the color here. We didn't get an error. So yeah, it goes outside of the bar. Okay, so if we just move them back into that and we'll change the color here to white, let's just say FFF, FFF. Now you can see the border of this has turned to white. So we can actually change this here to FFF, FFF. And you can see that the whole thing should change to white. And it changed to yellow. Probably because I forgot an F. There we go. You can see the border around here now is not white. So yeah, it goes outside of the bar. That was my mistake. I always forget every once in a while. It's been a long time since I've done this from scratch. So once you've changed the wallpaper, once you've changed, got this part here where you can actually change the colors, a few more things you can do with the bar. You can actually change the top and in the bottom or you can change it so that it will either appear on the top of the bottom. By default, it's on the bottom. And that's very easy. So we'll just go back here and tab over. So position, if you see, obviously you need to know how to spell it right, which I apparently don't. And we'll just do top. Okay. And we'll do, we'll write this, restart I3. And as you can see, the bar is now at the top. Okay. Once you've changed with the position of the bar, the next thing you want to do is probably make it bigger. So the best way to do this is to go back into your configuration file. And then go up here where it says font pingo and change this to, like, say, 14. And then restart I3. As you can see, it's bigger now. Now you can obviously also go through and change this font here. Oops. I believe I can do this. Ubuntu mona. I think that will work. Yeah, that works. That works fine. Okay. So the font is really important because you want to be able to see things. By default, it's eight point font is just entirely too small for everybody. I'm pretty sure that's safe to say. Somewhere between 10 and 14 is probably going to be the sweet spot. Anything bigger than that, it's going to take up your entire screen. Anything smaller than that, it's going to just be too hard to read. So the font is something that you'll definitely want to do. Now the last thing I'm going to be talking about is how to change what actually appears in the bar. So in order to do that, what we have to do is get the standard or I should say the default I3 status configuration file. And in order to do that, what we need to do is go back into our home directory and do CP slash Etsy I3 status.com. And then put that into a file called I3 status.com. Okay. And then we can just go ahead and then into I3 status.com. And then what we can go through and do is change those modules. Now, I believe we can find several different modules on this page here, which I'll link in the video description below. And I'm right. You can actually go through and find different modules right here on this thing. So it starts with IPv6 and goes all the way down and tells you exactly how to go through and use these things if you want to use them. So by default, we get IPv6, wireless first, Ethernet first, battery, disk, load, memory and time zone. So what I'm just going to do is I'm just going to comment out wireless because I don't have wireless on here. I'm going to comment out battery because this machine does not have a battery. And we'll just keep it that way. So we're going to go through and write that and then restart I3. And that didn't actually change anything. I wonder why it didn't change anything this time. Hmm. I just did this and it worked before. Give me a second. I know I'm forgetting something. Oh, you have to define where you want the configuration file. So what we're going to do is right click out of this. And we're going to CD into dot config I3 them into our configuration file. Go down here to the bottom. And at the end of this line here, we want to go dash dash config till the slash dot I3 status dot com. And we'll write that and then we can go through and start restart and we have an error. Did I misspell something? I obviously did something wrong. All right, CD dot I food. Then we're going to them into I3 I3 status. Oh, see, I got to make sure I actually go through and hide that folder. So we're going to move or that file. So move I3 status that competent dot I3 status dot com. Now restart I3. There we go. That works. It really does help if you don't make mistakes. But I make mistakes all the time, especially with typing because typing is hard and spelling is hard. And I'm an idiot. So moving on. All right. Anyways, as you can see there, it got rid of the ones that we didn't want there. Now let's just say we wanted to change something else in the bar. So we're going to them into the I3 them into I I3 status dot com. And we're going to go down to the time zone local. So it should be at the bottom. And what we want to do is actually just change the format of our times. We don't. I don't want 24 hour time. So I'm just going to change this to I. And we don't need the seconds. Oops. We don't need the seconds. But I would like AM and PM. So I'll do percent P. Okay. And we'll change that. We'll write quick. Well, we will restart I3. And now we can see we have the 12 hour time up here and we have the PM indicator noting that it's in the afternoon. So that would be how you go through and change this stuff. You can just go through and change these modules as you want. And I believe it actually includes all the modules that you can actually use right here in the default configuration file. But there might be a few more. Again, you can check those modules on that website that I've linked below. The documentation for I3 status is just as good as the documentation for I3 itself. So those are the things you should do right from the get go when you install I3. Change your terminal emulator, change the font, change your wallpaper, and then change your bar. Those are the things you want to do. Now if you want to go further than this, you can actually go through and watch my how to rice I3. And now I'll show you how to change the colors. It'll go through how to get rid of the title bar. If you want to get rid of the title bar and it'll go through how to change your key bindings. I also have a video on how to use SXHKD with I3, which will allow you to remove all the key bindings from your configuration file and move them into its standalone file using a daemon. That's really cool. That's something that I do with all my I3 configs. So that is it for this video. If you have any further tips for people who use I3, if you're just watching this video and you've been using I3 for a long time, leave them in the comments below. We'll be sure to look for those. If you're brand new to I3 and you have questions, you can leave those in the comments. I will try to answer them. I'm not saying I'm an expert at I3, obviously. But just know that I probably could answer your questions. If you have questions, if you want to, you can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. Devon, Chris, East Coast Web, Gentoo is fun too. Marcus, Meglin, Donnie, Sven, Jackson, Knife and Tool, Mitchell, Mr. Fox, Arch Center, American Camp. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.