Arch Linux Day 3: Switching Over to i3
So for some reason or another, I decided that it was a cool idea to switch from GNOME display manager to the i3 window manager. Well, why not?
Installation
sudo pacman -S i3 i3block
Easy enough, right?
Configuration
i3 looks aesthetically unappetizing right out of the box. That's why I followed
this video series to help me configure it. I replaced the default
i3status bar below with i3blocks, which seems much easier to configure in my
opinion. I added San Francisco font for the overall font, and
Font Awesome for the custom icons for some workspaces. I installed feh
to help with displaying my background image, and imagemagick to spice up my
lock screen. My i3 dot files are here if anyone wants to take a look
at them.
ImageMagick Pointers
If you use -font option, make sure that your font is installed in your system.
This caused me quite a lot of issues. Run
identify -list fonts | grep <fontname> if you want to check if imagemagick
can actually see your font.
I'm sure that experienced users of it know this: to pixelate an image, scale
the image down to say 10%, then scale it back up. This feature alone got me
hooked into investigating the powers of the convert tool.
compton, the Composite Manager
compton is a really cool tool that adds nice transitions between workspaces and stuff! Unfortunately, it doesn't exist in the default Arch repository - just the Arch Linux User Repository.
cd ~/build
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/compton/
cd compton
makepkg -sri
To enable it, I added the line exec --no-startup-id compton -f in my i3
config file.