 I don't think that it is any secret that I really like tabs. I use tabs in my file manager crusader. I use tabs in the browser and simple tab groups in Firefox so that I can keep a whole bunch of tabs there and keep them organized. I use tabs in them. I use tabs in my markdown editor. I like tabs and I don't think that that is really all that unusual, but I do tend to talk about it an awful lot or probably way more than anybody else. And that is a little bit nerdy, but I don't care. So I like tabs and one of the things about I3 that I really like is that it also has tabs. Now I've been very neglectful of this feature. I haven't used it very often in quite a while and I'm severely disappointed in myself because I've gotten into using them again over the last couple of days and tabs in I3 are amazing. Like they're really, really good and I'm going to talk about why today. But before we do, I want to thank everybody who's continued to watch this video up until now because it takes a certain type of nerd to care about tabs at all. But tabs and window managers, you have to be like an uber nerd. So welcome to the club, my friends. If you're still watching this video, let's go ahead and talk about tabs in I3. Like seriously, let's nerd out. So why would you want to use tabs in a window manager? Well, the reason why you use a window manager is to save screen space as much as possible to have as much information and windows on your screen as possible. Now if you have a gigantic 49 inch monitor, you can fit as many windows as you like on that thing. It really doesn't matter how you can serve space on that because you have a gigantic monitor. If you have like six monitors, it's probably not as much of a priority to you to save space as it is somebody who's using like a 13 inch laptop, you know what I mean? So conserving screen space in a tiling window manager is one of the primary reasons why you would use a tiling window manager. Now that is also the case for me. I am a big proponent of workspaces and one of the reasons why I use so many workspaces is because I'm a little bit uninterested in having more than two windows on the same workspace. I really don't care for having more than two windows on a workspace. It really doesn't work for my workflow. And even though I have a gigantic 32 inch monitor here and a 27 inch monitor there, I really don't care to have more than just two windows side by side. If I have to have three, maybe I can make that work, you know, every once in a while I do. But for the most part, anything more than that, it just makes it look weird. So let me actually show you this. So this right here is my current iteration of i3. And I have two windows side by side. If I were to open up another one, as you can see, the more windows I open, the more constrained the spaces. And this matters because as the windows get smaller, the less functional they become. So let's just say in this last window that I opened, I wanted to open up B top. Now B top is one of those applications that will just not run unless the window is at the minimum of a certain size. So it really requires something 80 by 24 in terms of rows and columns. Now I could resize this obviously I could do something like this and you know this and this and also it would be a mess, or if I wanted to I could pop that out and make it into a floating window, do the thing that I need to do into it and then close it. But the thing is, is that there's another way to make this work and that is tabs. Now there is one thing that I haven't figured out yet and I've just kind of thought about it, is that if you're in a situation where you have windows like this, I don't know if there's a way to pop these windows into tabs. If that solution exists, I'd love to hear about that, because that'd be really cool. But let me show you what tabs look like in I3. So if I do super shift T, and I believe that is the default key binding, I don't think that I've changed it. I am now in tab mode. Now basically the way tab mode works is that the window that you are in focus of will now be the source of all of your tabs. So if I open up another window, it should open up in a tab and it does. Now mine's going to look a little bit different than yours. If you're using stock I3, or you haven't done any configuration of tabs itself, you're going to end up with a title bar. Even if you have title bars disabled in regular windows like I do here, you would probably still end up with a title bar in a tab. I don't prefer title bars at all. I don't like them. And I think they're unsightly in waste space, which is a little ironic given these gigantic gaps that I have. But you get the point. For me, I make the title bar exactly one pixel high. Or maybe it's two pixels. I'm not actually sure. The point is that it's a little bit higher than the regular border. And basically what that does is it highlights the tab that I'm in. So instead of having a title up there, I just have a color. So I can tell that there is a tab here, because there's a part here with no border. And there's a part with the border. The part with the border is the window that is currently active. And then I can move to the other one by using super H. And that brings in this one. So let's open up something here. So this is H top. And I can move to the other one, super L and open up, say, B top, which is not big enough. But you get the point. Now I can move to the other tab again by super H. And that goes back and forth super H, L, H, L, HL. You get the point. And as you can see the benefits of this already, I can open up another window and it opens up another tab. I can open up, say, them in this here. So I'll just open up them like so in cases and then I can open another tab and I can have as many windows as I want in my preferred layout to windows side by side. But really, there are five windows here. And that saves space and allows me to easily move back and forth between them with the VIM keys and super the super and VIM keys, like so, but without taking up the extra space that I would have to take up if they were all open and in front of me in tiling mode. That's the benefit of tabs. And the thing is, is that I three comes with tabs out of the box, you can do this right away. Now I three is not the only window manager that does this. I don't want to, you know, malign or get into a fight with all the fans of all the other window managers that say, Oh my God, Herp's loft has this and, you know, PWM has a version of this and, you know, awesome has a version of this. They all basically have a version of this. I three specifically calls them tabs. Everyone else usually calls this like single column, monocle mode or something weird like that. This is tabs, how it should be done. And as you can see, it's just really good. Now, one of the things that is a little weird is transparency. And you might see that here is that if you have transparency enabled through something like pi com, or you're using sway and you have transparency enabled, you're going to see the window that's underneath it. And depending on what's underneath it, it's going to be a little bit weird. So if I were to have something like, say a pulse audio volume control here, that opens up in a tab as well. And then if I move to the tab that was right before it, it actually moves on top of that tab that we just opened. And as you can see, all the moving bits are still back there. And it's a little weird and you can see them. And if you're going to do work like this, transparency may not be the best option for you. I personally don't mind it. Usually I don't have moving things back there that will distract me like this. Probably would. Usually it's just another terminal or, you know, a version of Firefox or something like that, you know, whatever happens to be usually it's not anything that's going to be that distracting, but it is something to keep in mind if you're going to use this, that transparency does mean that you're going to see the things underneath it. Now, you're not going to see all the things. Like if you are somewhere else in the stack and you are using application like the top or something like that, you're not going to see anything underneath it all that easy. Like you can, if you look really freaking closely, you can still see that H top is underneath there running, but it's not that visible. You're only going to see one window underneath it is what I'm trying to see. You're not going to see the whole stack. Transparency has some limits at least. So that is one downside. If you're going to use transparency, it does move you maybe to turn that off. You if you're going to use tabs very often. And to be honest with you, I like the way that I do tabs with just the highlights of the one that is active at the top. But that's not going to be for everybody. And the reason why is because the way I have this set up is that right now I can't tell you how many tabs that I have. I know that there are more than two or three because you can kind of see how small the areas appear of the tab that's active. So I know that there's more than two or three, but I don't know the exact number. By default, title bars are up there and they stay up there for even inactive tabs so you can click through them with a mouse if you wanted to whatever. So if you're the type that is going to use tabs like this, like crazy, maybe the title bars are good to keep. Now, like I said, I don't use title bars at all. I'm thinking actually about re enabling them now that I'm using tabs so much simply because they would be kind of nice to have in the tab setting. I'm not sure if I'll enable them, you know, in just regular mode, but in the tab mode or in the tab layout, I would probably enable the title bar simply because it will allow me to easily see how many tabs that I have open, what are in the tabs and so on and so forth. So that is tabs in I3. Now, like I said, I3 doesn't have this feature on lockdown. A whole bunch of other window managers have this. And they're all equally amazing. They call them different things. Sometimes they're not defaults. You have to patch them in like with DWM. You have to patch that particular layout in, but they exist. So if you are using another window manager and you would like this tabs integration with them, chances are your window manager has it. They probably call it something different, like I said, but it's probably there. And the thing is, is that if you're on a monitor or a screen where you are constrained in size, tabs are absolutely amazing. They allow you to have a whole bunch of windows open on one workspace without having switched workspaces or any of that stuff. And it's just it's really, really good. So that was 10 minutes on my love of tabs in I3. I hope that I inspired you to give this a try because I think that this will be useful for a lot of people. And yeah, that's it for this video. If you have comments on tabs in I3 or in tabs in any of the window manager, you can leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast, just like all these fine people. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the channel just would not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very, very much for your support. I do truly appreciate it. And just a note on the microphone placement before I leave, I'm messing around with it. I have been alerted that my audio has gone down since I switched mics, the quality has gone down. So I'm messing around with it. I'm working on it. So I promise to continue working on it again. So everybody, thanks for watching. I appreciate it. I'll see you next time.