 Now, as my channel has gotten larger, I have more and more people asking me questions that are a little more basic about system configuration. Specifically, how do I get my computer to look like that? How do I get the windows to pop up so that they automatically resize? Or other such, I guess, questions that are, I don't want to call them basic in a condescending way, but they're easy to answer. Now in this video I'm going to do two things. I want to talk, for those of you who don't know, don't know what a tiling window manager is. I want to talk about what that is and why I use it and why it's better. For those who do know what that is and have maybe been watching the channel for a longer time, I'm going to talk about the changes that I've made to my i3 config since the last time I put out a video on i3, which has probably been maybe a year and a half. It's been a while. It's been quite a while. I have added a bunch of little tweaks. All the basics are sort of the same, but we'll get into that. Anyway, this is i3. This is a tiling window manager. What a tiling window manager is, is a window manager that does just what we said just a second ago. When you spawn a window, it automatically resizes everything so that you can see every window at the same time. Now I can move windows around. I can go from window to window and do different stuff, all this kind of stuff. Now of course it isn't just with terminals. I can bring up, let's say, a web browser. I can put it over here. I'll go to my GitHub. Maybe it's too crowded on this workspace. We're on workspace one right now. I can send this to workspace two, do something there. I can go to workspace three and make some windows, et cetera, et cetera. The general way a tiling window manager works, they're all a little different, but the general way they work is on each of your workspaces, you can put windows pretty much where you want. They automatically configure so that they all tile together. They are all visible at all given points in time. You can go to different workspaces to do different things. You can, again, have your web browser in one workspace and do something else on another or something like that. That's generally how tiling window managers work. The one that I use is called i3, which I suppose I should say has nothing to do with the processor, the i3 processor. I should say that. Now i3 is probably the most commonly used tiling window manager on Linux and probably any operating system because people using tiling window managers are pretty much all using Linux or BSD or something. I'll go ahead and talk about how mine works and how I get what I need out of it. I got rid of my face there, let me bring it back. But anyway, to spawn windows, I'm going to turn on screen key so you know what key is I'm pressing. I will say all of the key presses that are shortcuts in i3 are going to use the super key or the windows key. I might call it super, I might call it windows, I might call it mod, but I'm just going to ignore it. If I press enter, it creates a window, I really mean if I press super enter. Just be aware. All the i3 shortcuts are going to have super with them. Anyway, so enter spawns a workspace. I can press t, super t, to change the direction in which windows are being spawned. So if I go here and I press super, it's going to spawn to the right. If I press t and then super, it's going to spawn downwards until I press t again. That's generally how it works on i3. Now other tiling window managers, they work a little bit different. I think on awesome for example, you just create window, you tell it how you want windows to be configured on a particular workspace or something like that. So there are different tiling window managers work a little differently, but to move from window to window that you've spawned, you can use vim keys. By default, they're not actually vim keys. They're like j through semicolon, which I think is totally ridiculous, but I have remapped them to vim keys. So j to go down, k to go up, you'll see that I am moving up and down, l goes right and h goes left. So just typical vim keys here. And let's say I have this window here and I want to move it. I can just hold down shift and super and press those same keys and it will move to different parts of the environment, the workspace. So that's how you move stuff around. Now some people have bindings to binding, they like set their mouse so that you can click and drag. I don't use that just because it's so rare that I need to you. I mean, the part of the idea behind tiling window managers is you're pretty much only, you only really need to use your fingers on your keyboard. And that's it. You don't really have to go over to the mouse to do stuff. So usually when I use my mouse, it is in a video when I'm specifically pointing at something. I'm actually working on something I very rarely use the mouse. I'll just say that. So anyway, to get rid of windows, I can just press q, super q, and that will get rid of some of these windows. So again, spawning them, t for toggling which direction, q for getting rid of them. I'll also say one thing you can do by default, this is, well, this is an aspect of my own configuration. If you want to resize windows, you just press capital Y U I or O. It's going to be mod, super, or yeah, super, and then shift, and Y U I know. And that will resize how your window is in comparison with other ones. This is very useful just to get the exact kind of dimensions you need. By default, I3 has this other silly way, well, I think it's silly of resizing where you press a resize shortcut, then resize, then undo the resize mode. I think that's just too much. So I just bound them, again, to capital Y U I know, we'll do that. So other basics, I have a whole bunch of programs that are mapped by default to different bindings. So M will bring up my music player, R will bring up Ranger for managing files, or I will bring up H top, or something like that. Now of course I can run any of these commands manually in one of the terminals, but I like having bindings to bring up a terminal with them just without me having to type in the name or something like that. D is D menu, so mod D, and that allows me to type in some specific command, say Firefox, and bring up Firefox. But I also have Firefox bound to W, so if I press super W it will pop up. So nice and simple, and this is pretty much the basics of it. You can of course change, notice there are gaps in between the windows. I can change those with S or capital S, so S increases the gaps, capital S will decrease them, oops, sorry, missed it. Or Z and capital Z will change the outer gaps, so if you like the aesthetics of something like this for one particular window or workspace, you might like it. You can also get rid of gaps altogether with capital D or capital T to get them back to normal. All these bindings I should say are specific to my configuration, my .files. If you want to get my .files I should probably say because if I say it at the end, people don't often watch to the end of YouTube videos, that's one thing you learn. You can go to larbs.xyz, some of you guys already know this, but I have a nice little script that will install my .files on any installation of an arched based Linux distribution. You just download the script and run it, and if you want to see what's actually in the script so you're not running some scary thing that someone on YouTube gave you, you can go to my GitHub, larbs is the script and void rice is the repository that has all the .files that it installs, so you can browse through that if you want to just see what kind of stuff that I have by default, but anyway. I will say if you're using that at any point in time, you can press super and then F1 and that will bring up a nice little guide that actually lists out all the bindings, including all the ones that I'm not going to talk about in this video, but so anyway, I've talked about basically how you move around and stuff like that, so hopefully if you're a new user, you sort of understand how a tiling window manager works, all of them work a little differently. I have my own bindings that do their own things, but I want to talk about some of the stuff that I've added since the last time I did a video on i3 again, which has been like over a year now, so one of the bigger changes I've made is that I've added in, let me get rid of all these, I've added in a bunch of different D-menu scripts, so D-menu if you don't know, I've done a Gajillion videos on it by now because it's just the most useful program in the universe. You can auto create any kind of menu from standard input and make it do whatever you want, long story short. Let me show you some of the implementations I have of D-menu. I've done videos on some of these individually, but for example, if I want to mount a drive, I can press super and F9 and that will automatically detect all of the unmounted partitions that I have and give them a display up here. So for example, this partition here, this drive is 1.8 terabytes. I can mount that if I want. I'll press enter and that will mount it. If it's detected in my FS tab, if it's detected in my system settings where I want to mount it, it won't ask where to mount it, it'll just mount it. So now that is, you can see that now this is mounted in the location it's supposed to be and I can unmount drives with mod plus F10, super plus F10. And that'll list out all the unmountable drives and I can unmount that. So that's, originally I had some silly little script that read all the drives and then you had to separately store where you want them to be mounted and that was so stupid. That was just like one day I lazily wrote the script when I didn't know that like FS tab existed cuz I was like just new to Linux. But so this is much more efficient. I can map pretty much anything, or map, mount pretty much anything. And it also works on Android devices now. So you can plug up an Android device and it requires simple MTF, whatever it is. I don't know, you can look at my .files for the requirements, but it'll mount Android devices as well. So that's very convenient. Additionally, I can't show you this in action, but I'll show you that this exists. If I press super in F3, this will be a screen selector. So I'm on a VGA TV right now and I have my laptop right here and I'm recording off this VGA TV. But if I press mod F3, I can switch. If I wanna switch back to the laptop, this D-Menu prompt automatically detects what kind of things you have connected to your computer and will give you them as an option. Or you can also press in multi monitor and manually say, I want VGA to be my primary display and I want the laptop to be on its left side and I'm gonna press no to that. Or I should also say you also have the manual selection option, which allows you to use a render and you can just manually set it up however you want. So this script has been one additional thing that I've added. Again, another great D-Menu script. It was super easy to write, super easy to use. You can check it out on my .files in my void rise repository, somewhere in the scripts folder. So other things, some people, I did a video on this just like a couple of weeks ago. But then I used it in a video right afterwards and everyone asked about it. So I should mention it one more time. I have an emoji insertor now and this again is a D-Menu prompt. If I press, what is it? Super press the graph plus the graph accent. It will bring this up so I can type in, let's say I want an emoji of a potato. Okay, great. So now I have this and it copies it to the clipboard. It also copies the Unicode sequence to your primary selection in case you need that. And I can insert the potato pasted in and there's our potato. Or let's say, I don't know, watermelon, put in some watermelons. Great, fantastic. So that's a nice little, again, another little D-Menu prompt. I find it very useful for inserting stuff like that. And I also, let's see, any other, I think I wrote down some D-Menu stuff to talk. Oh yeah, one other one that I can't show you because I'm actually using it right now is the screen recorder. So if you press super and then print screen, that will give you a little prompt that says, do you want to do a screen cast? Do you want to record audio? Do you want to record video, et cetera? And depending on what you select, it will start an FFmpeg script that you can cancel by pressing mod plus delete. So that's pretty convenient as well. And you'll see this icon up in the status bar that shows you what you're doing. So this is like screen casting, basically. Now I should say that while I'm on the topic of the status bar, I have, I've been adding stuff to this every once in a while, I make some changes. I did a video on my status bar you can check out. But since other people are using my .files, if you right-click on any of these, it'll give a little information about it. So my music module, torrents module, that's the difference, what the symbols mean, my seeding torrents, downloading torrents, weather module, daily low, daily high. So if you right-click on these, it'll give you some info about it. But obviously that isn't for me, that's for the people who use the .files. But that's just a little addition that you might find useful. I'm trying to think of what else. So on, oh yeah, so just some little tiny perks. Let's say I copy my, I don't know why I copy everything twice, but if I copy this URL, let's say I'm off doing some work over here and I forgot, you know, what do I have in my clipboard or whatever? I can just type in super and then insert and it lists out what's in my primary selection and what's in my clipboard. Nice and easy. Additionally, when I did my video, I guess a month or so ago on QR codes, someone in the comments had a really smart idea, I guess, she mentioned that she had a script that takes what's in your clipboard and makes a QR code out of it. So let's say I have, again, I have like this URL as my, in my clipboard. If I, I've mapped this script to I think, what is it, super and pause and what it does is it automatically generates a QR code for whatever is in my clipboard. So then I can take this and I can, you know, scan it with my barcode reader on my phone and that'll automatically pop, the text will automatically transfer to my phone. So I found that very convenient. I forget what her name was, but one of you guys out there, let's see, now is there anything else? I think I've gone over some of the little additions, honestly, there are just so many things that I've, I've made more efficient, like I look at the stuff that I was putting out a year or so ago, and I was like, oh man, a lot of that is just so primitive. I've made a whole lot, a lot of stuff more efficient. Additionally, I have, I think I mentioned this before, but not in this video, of course, if you press super a, that'll give you a dropdown calculator. It'll follow you to whatever screen you want. I often find that it's nice to be able to, you know, have some kind of calculator for you to just sort of play around, do some math in, and then hide it by pressing super a again. Same thing with a dropdown terminal with super you. This is just the Tmux window. And I've had these for a while, but they're now, I don't, I'm not going to explain to you how, but they're way more efficient in the way that they're called. But they, yeah, and they, they automatically, I3, in I3 you can set special settings for them and stuff like that. I think this is about it. I'm probably going to cut it off right about now. If you have any questions, again, you can check out. I'm going to put a link to my, not just my .files repo, but also this particular PDF that goes through all the stuff that you can, all the different bindings in the system or whatever. But again, if you're using my system, if you've already downloaded my .files, you should be able to press super in F1 to bring this little guide up. Anyway, so that, that's about it. And I'll see you guys next time, I guess, because I guess there's so much more to talk about, but I might as well leave it to another video or talk about things specifically because I've just added so much stuff here. But that's about it. So yeah, see you.