I installed it a couple years ago, went whole hog, down the rabbit hole, but realized a couple of things.
1. I rarely ever use anything more than a simple L/R split.
2. When I do use something more complex, it's almost always in the terminal, in which case why not use tmux?
These days I'm back to using gnome because ubuntu switched to it over unity (which had a weird multitouch bug that drove me crazy).
What do you get out of i3 beyond a simple L/R split supported by simpler wms and how often do you use it?
I use i3 with polybar and have dedicated workspace icons (web browser, terminal, editor, to-do, email, music, etc) for quick navigation between different applications. Over time I’ve built up muscle memory (i.e $Mod+3 will bring me to my editor) that has significantly sped up my development process. While you could use another window manager for a similar purpose, I find the relatively minimalist approach of i3 + polybar in my case to be fast and highly configurable.
I treat each workspace as dedicated for a specific purpose - Dev, Browsing, Chat, etc. That gives me quick mnemonics to hop to each space: MOD+1, MOD+2, MOD+3, ...
Within my Dev workspace, I use a tabbed pane for top-level organization: browsers (stacked), IDE, terminal, Emacs (magit + org), etc. This keeps my focus on that space when doing dev, and away from the laptop monitor, which is only occasionally useful as a reference.
I'll occasionally stack a terminal beneath my IDE if the current task requires it, e.g. to test a deployment or a project task.
1. Workspaces. Not at all unique to i3 but I’ve kept mine themed and automatically load certain apps into the same workspaces—all things i3 makes easy to do.
2. Floating scratchpad for media player. Nice to have my music controls always accessible but only visible when I unhide them.
3. Vertical split beneath my editor with a terminal. Just my personal preference, but I typically have L/R with code/browser and then split the code half vertically.
Being able to move windows across displays and workspaces quickly are other pluses, but again, not at all i3 exclusive.
It means I can have an overview of a bunch of different things and keep terminals context-specific (1 terminal for htop, 1 for docker, 1 for whatever remote test environment, 1 for project A, 1 for project B, 1 for some other remote host I need for some reason, etc.) If I want to do a new task unrelated to anything I'm doing before, I don't need to break the context of an existing terminal, I just press Alt+Enter, it's automatically slotted into a place where it's completely visible and usable and I can do that task quickly. When I'm done, I can close it, again, without disturbing the context of all the other terminals. It's just incredibly freeing to have that and I feel it frees a lot of cognitive load by being able to go back to a terminal for a certain task and immediately see exactly where I was and what I did last.
Also, much like the other comments, I use task-specific virtual desktops all the time. First desktop is for all the terminals. Second is for browser/communication. Third is for project A. Fourth is documentation related to projA. Fifth is projB. Sixth can be more documentation. I often have 10 virtual desktops for different things. I don't want to imagine what it'd look like if I had it all on one desktop.
I sometimes do move to more of a tmux split workflow, especially if I'm working on remote machines, but it's just much nicer to have the same keyboard commands for all of my windows.
This would not be possibly if I wasn't using 4k monitors. That was a big shift for me, because now I think of each 4k monitor as 4 1080p displays.
(Sidenote: is there any sort of linux libvte-based terminal emulator that has tmux integration a-la iTerm2? For when I do use i3, it would be really nice if I could spawn a new terminal on a remote server, attaching through an existing tmux session.)
