i3 User’s Guide

One very basic operation is opening a new terminal. By default, the keybinding for this is $mod+Enter, that is Alt+Enter in the default configuration. By pressing $mod+Enter, a new terminal will be opened. It will fill the whole space available on your screen.

If you now open another terminal, i3 will place it next to the current one, splitting the screen size in half. Depending on your monitor, i3 will put the created window beside the existing window (on wide displays) or below the existing window (rotated displays).

To move the focus between the two terminals, you can use the direction keys which you may know from the editor vi. However, in i3, your homerow is used for these keys (in vi, the keys are shifted to the left by one for compatibility with most keyboard layouts). Therefore, $mod+J is left, $mod+K is down, $mod+L is up and $mod+; is right. So, to switch between the terminals, use $mod+K or $mod+L. Of course, you can also use the arrow keys.

At the moment, your workspace is split (it contains two terminals) in a specific direction (horizontal by default). Every window can be split horizontally or vertically again, just like the workspace. The terminology is "window" for a container that actually contains an X11 window (like a terminal or browser) and "split container" for containers that consist of one or more windows.

TODO: picture of the tree

To split a window vertically, press $mod+v before you create the new window. To split it horizontally, press $mod+h.

A split container can have one of the following layouts:

To switch modes, press $mod+e for splith/splitv (it toggles), $mod+s for stacking and $mod+w for tabbed.

To display a window in fullscreen mode or to go out of fullscreen mode again, press $mod+f.

There is also a global fullscreen mode in i3 in which the client will span all available outputs (the command is fullscreen global).

Aside from opening applications from a terminal, you can also use the handy dmenu which is opened by pressing $mod+d by default. Just type the name (or a part of it) of the application which you want to open. The corresponding application has to be in your $PATH for this to work.

Additionally, if you have applications you open very frequently, you can create a keybinding for starting the application directly. See the section [configuring] for details.

If an application does not provide a mechanism for closing (most applications provide a menu, the escape key or a shortcut like Control+W to close), you can press $mod+Shift+q to kill a window. For applications which support the WM_DELETE protocol, this will correctly close the application (saving any modifications or doing other cleanup). If the application doesn’t support the WM_DELETE protocol your X server will kill the window and the behaviour depends on the application.

Workspaces are an easy way to group a set of windows. By default, you are on the first workspace, as the bar on the bottom left indicates. To switch to another workspace, press $mod+num where num is the number of the workspace you want to use. If the workspace does not exist yet, it will be created.

A common paradigm is to put the web browser on one workspace, communication applications (mutt, irssi, …) on another one, and the ones with which you work, on the third one. Of course, there is no need to follow this approach.

If you have multiple screens, a workspace will be created on each screen at startup. If you open a new workspace, it will be bound to the screen you created it on. When you switch to a workspace on another screen, i3 will set focus to that screen.

To move a window to another workspace, simply press $mod+Shift+num where num is (like when switching workspaces) the number of the target workspace. Similarly to switching workspaces, the target workspace will be created if it does not yet exist.

The easiest way to resize a container is by using the mouse: Grab the border and move it to the wanted size.

See [resizingconfig] for how to configure i3 to be able to resize columns/rows with your keyboard.

To restart i3 in place (and thus get into a clean state if there is a bug, or to upgrade to a newer version of i3) you can use $mod+Shift+r.

To cleanly exit i3 without killing your X server, you can use $mod+Shift+e.

Floating mode is the opposite of tiling mode. The position and size of a window are not managed automatically by i3, but manually by you. Using this mode violates the tiling paradigm but can be useful for some corner cases like "Save as" dialog windows, or toolbar windows (GIMP or similar). Those windows usually set the appropriate hint and are opened in floating mode by default.

You can toggle floating mode for a window by pressing $mod+Shift+Space. By dragging the window’s titlebar with your mouse you can move the window around. By grabbing the borders and moving them you can resize the window. You can also do that by using the [floating_modifier]. Another way to resize floating windows using the mouse is to right-click on the titlebar and drag.

For resizing floating windows with your keyboard, see [resizingconfig].

Floating windows are always on top of tiling windows.

The building blocks of our tree are so called Containers. A Container can host a window (meaning an X11 window, one that you can actually see and use, like a browser). Alternatively, it could contain one or more Containers. A simple example is the workspace: When you start i3 with a single monitor, a single workspace and you open two terminal windows, you will end up with a tree like this:

It is only natural to use so-called Split Containers in order to build a layout when using a tree as data structure. In i3, every Container has an orientation (horizontal, vertical or unspecified) and the orientation depends on the layout the container is in (vertical for splitv and stacking, horizontal for splith and tabbed). So, in our example with the workspace, the default layout of the workspace Container is splith (most monitors are widescreen nowadays). If you change the layout to splitv ($mod+v in the default config) and then open two terminals, i3 will configure your windows like this:

An interesting new feature of i3 since version 4 is the ability to split anything: Let’s assume you have two terminals on a workspace (with splith layout, that is horizontal orientation), focus is on the right terminal. Now you want to open another terminal window below the current one. If you would just open a new terminal window, it would show up to the right due to the splith layout. Instead, press $mod+v to split the container with the splitv layout (to open a Horizontal Split Container, use $mod+h). Now you can open a new terminal and it will open below the current one:

You probably guessed it already: There is no limit on how deep your hierarchy of splits can be.

Let’s stay with our example from above. We have a terminal on the left and two vertically split terminals on the right, focus is on the bottom right one. When you open a new terminal, it will open below the current one.

So, how can you open a new terminal window to the right of the current one? The solution is to use focus parent, which will focus the Parent Container of the current Container. In this case, you would focus the Vertical Split Container which is inside the horizontally oriented workspace. Thus, now new windows will be opened to the right of the Vertical Split Container:

In some cases, i3 needs to implicitly create a container to fulfill your command.

One example is the following scenario: You start i3 with a single monitor and a single workspace on which you open three terminal windows. All these terminal windows are directly attached to one node inside i3’s layout tree, the workspace node. By default, the workspace node’s orientation is horizontal.

Now you move one of these terminals down ($mod+Shift+k by default). The workspace node’s orientation will be changed to vertical. The terminal window you moved down is directly attached to the workspace and appears on the bottom of the screen. A new (horizontal) container was created to accommodate the other two terminal windows. You will notice this when switching to tabbed mode (for example). You would end up having one tab called "another container" and the other one being the terminal window you moved down.

It is possible and recommended to use comments in your configuration file to properly document your setup for later reference. Comments are started with a # and can only be used at the beginning of a line:

Examples:

i3 has support for both X core fonts and FreeType fonts (through Pango) to render window titles.

To generate an X core font description, you can use xfontsel(1). To see special characters (Unicode), you need to use a font which supports the ISO-10646 encoding.

A FreeType font description is composed by a font family, a style, a weight, a variant, a stretch and a size. FreeType fonts support right-to-left rendering and contain often more Unicode glyphs than X core fonts.

If i3 cannot open the configured font, it will output an error in the logfile and fall back to a working font.

Syntax:

Examples:

A keyboard binding makes i3 execute a command (see below) upon pressing a specific key. i3 allows you to bind either on keycodes or on keysyms (you can also mix your bindings, though i3 will not protect you from overlapping ones).

My recommendation is: If you often switch keyboard layouts but you want to keep your bindings in the same physical location on the keyboard, use keycodes. If you don’t switch layouts, and want a clean and simple config file, use keysyms.

Some tools (such as import or xdotool) might be unable to run upon a KeyPress event, because the keyboard/pointer is still grabbed. For these situations, the --release flag can be used, which will execute the command after the keys have been released.

Syntax:

Examples:

Available Modifiers:

To move floating windows with your mouse, you can either grab their titlebar or configure the so called floating modifier which you can then press and click anywhere in the window itself to move it. The most common setup is to use the same key you use for managing windows (Mod1 for example). Then you can press Mod1, click into a window using your left mouse button, and drag it to the position you want.

When holding the floating modifier, you can resize a floating window by pressing the right mouse button on it and moving around while holding it. If you hold the shift button as well, the resize will be proportional (the aspect ratio will be preserved).

Syntax:

Example:

The maximum and minimum dimensions of floating windows can be specified. If either dimension of floating_maximum_size is specified as -1, that dimension will be unconstrained with respect to its maximum value. If either dimension of floating_maximum_size is undefined, or specified as 0, i3 will use a default value to constrain the maximum size. floating_minimum_size is treated in a manner analogous to floating_maximum_size.

Syntax:

Example:

New workspaces get a reasonable default orientation: Wide-screen monitors (anything wider than high) get horizontal orientation, rotated monitors (anything higher than wide) get vertical orientation.

With the default_orientation configuration directive, you can override that behavior.

Syntax:

Example:

This option determines in which mode new containers on workspace level will start.

Syntax:

Example:

This option determines which border style new windows will have. The default is "normal". Note that new_float applies only to windows which are starting out as floating windows, e.g. dialog windows.

Syntax:

Example:

The "normal" and "pixel" border styles support an optional border width in pixels:

Example:

You can hide vertical borders adjacent to the screen edges using hide_edge_borders. This is useful if you are using scrollbars, or do not want to waste even two pixels in displayspace. Default is none.

Syntax:

Example:

With the for_window command, you can let i3 execute any command when it encounters a specific window. This can be used to set windows to floating or to change their border style, for example.

Syntax:

Examples:

The valid criteria are the same as those for commands, see [command_criteria].

As you learned in the section about keyboard bindings, you will have to configure lots of bindings containing modifier keys. If you want to save yourself some typing and be able to change the modifier you use later, variables can be handy.

Syntax:

Example:

Variables are directly replaced in the file when parsing. Variables expansion is not recursive so it is not possible to define a variable with a value containing another variable. There is no fancy handling and there are absolutely no plans to change this. If you need a more dynamic configuration you should create a little script which generates a configuration file and run it before starting i3 (for example in your ~/.xsession file).

To automatically make a specific window show up on a specific workspace, you can use an assignment. You can match windows by using any criteria, see [command_criteria]. It is recommended that you match on window classes (and instances, when appropriate) instead of window titles whenever possible because some applications first create their window, and then worry about setting the correct title. Firefox with Vimperator comes to mind. The window starts up being named Firefox, and only when Vimperator is loaded does the title change. As i3 will get the title as soon as the application maps the window (mapping means actually displaying it on the screen), you’d need to have to match on Firefox in this case.

Assignments are processed by i3 in the order in which they appear in the config file. The first one which matches the window wins and later assignments are not considered.

Syntax:

Examples:

Note that the arrow is not required, it just looks good :-). If you decide to use it, it has to be a UTF-8 encoded arrow, not -> or something like that.

To get the class and instance, you can use xprop. After clicking on the window, you will see the following output:

xprop:

The first part of the WM_CLASS is the instance ("irssi" in this example), the second part is the class ("URxvt" in this example).

Should you have any problems with assignments, make sure to check the i3 logfile first (see http://i3wm.org/docs/debugging.html). It includes more details about the matching process and the window’s actual class, instance and title when starting up.

Note that if you want to start an application just once on a specific workspace, but you don’t want to assign all instances of it permanently, you can make use of i3’s startup-notification support (see [exec]) in your config file in the following way:

Start iceweasel on workspace 3 (once):

By using the exec keyword outside a keybinding, you can configure which commands will be performed by i3 on initial startup. exec commands will not run when restarting i3, if you need a command to run also when restarting i3 you should use the exec_always keyword. These commands will be run in order.

Syntax:

Examples:

The flag --no-startup-id is explained in [exec].

If you assign clients to workspaces, it might be handy to put the workspaces on specific screens. Also, the assignment of workspaces to screens will determine which workspace i3 uses for a new screen when adding screens or when starting (e.g., by default it will use 1 for the first screen, 2 for the second screen and so on).

Syntax:

The output is the name of the RandR output you attach your screen to. On a laptop, you might have VGA1 and LVDS1 as output names. You can see the available outputs by running xrandr --current.

If you use named workspaces, they must be quoted:

Examples:

You can change all colors which i3 uses to draw the window decorations.

Syntax:

Where colorclass can be one of:

You can also specify the color to be used to paint the background of the client windows. This color will be used to paint the window on top of which the client will be rendered.

Syntax:

Only clients that do not cover the whole area of this window expose the color used to paint it.

Colors are in HTML hex format (#rrggbb), see the following example:

Examples (default colors):

Note that for the window decorations, the color around the child window is the background color, and the border color is only the two thin lines at the top of the window.

The indicator color is used for indicating where a new window will be opened. For horizontal split containers, the right border will be painted in indicator color, for vertical split containers, the bottom border. This only applies to single windows within a split container, which are otherwise indistinguishable from single windows outside of a split container.

i3 uses Unix sockets to provide an IPC interface. This allows third-party programs to get information from i3, such as the current workspaces (to display a workspace bar), and to control i3.

The IPC socket is enabled by default and will be created in /tmp/i3-%u.XXXXXX/ipc-socket.%p where %u is your UNIX username, %p is the PID of i3 and XXXXXX is a string of random characters from the portable filename character set (see mkdtemp(3)).

You can override the default path through the environment-variable I3SOCK or by specifying the ipc-socket directive. This is discouraged, though, since i3 does the right thing by default. If you decide to change it, it is strongly recommended to set this to a location in your home directory so that no other user can create that directory.

Examples:

You can then use the i3-msg application to perform any command listed in the next section.

By default, window focus follows your mouse movements. However, if you have a setup where your mouse usually is in your way (like a touchpad on your laptop which you do not want to disable completely), you might want to disable focus follows mouse and control focus only by using your keyboard. The mouse will still be useful inside the currently active window (for example to click on links in your browser window).

Syntax:

Example:

By default, when switching focus to a window on a different output (e.g. focusing a window on workspace 3 on output VGA-1, coming from workspace 2 on LVDS-1), the mouse cursor is warped to the center of that window.

With the mouse_warping option, you can control when the mouse cursor should be warped. none disables warping entirely, whereas output is the default behavior described above.

Syntax:

Example:

When you are in fullscreen mode, some applications still open popup windows (take Xpdf for example). This is because these applications may not be aware that they are in fullscreen mode (they do not check the corresponding hint). There are three things which are possible to do in this situation:

Syntax:

Example:

When being in a tabbed or stacked container, the first container will be focused when you use focus down on the last container — the focus wraps. If however there is another stacked/tabbed container in that direction, focus will be set on that container. This is the default behavior so you can navigate to all your windows without having to use focus parent.

If you want the focus to always wrap and you are aware of using focus parent to switch to different containers, you can use the force_focus_wrapping configuration directive. After enabling it, the focus will always wrap.

Syntax:

Example:

As explained in-depth in http://i3wm.org/docs/multi-monitor.html, some X11 video drivers (especially the nVidia binary driver) only provide support for Xinerama instead of RandR. In such a situation, i3 must be told to use the inferior Xinerama API explicitly and therefore don’t provide support for reconfiguring your screens on the fly (they are read only once on startup and that’s it).

For people who cannot modify their ~/.xsession to add the --force-xinerama commandline parameter, a configuration option is provided:

Syntax:

Example:

Also note that your output names are not descriptive (like HDMI1) when using Xinerama, instead they are counted up, starting at 0: xinerama-0, xinerama-1, …

This configuration directive enables automatic workspace back_and_forth (see [back_and_forth]) when switching to the workspace that is currently focused.

For instance: Assume you are on workspace "1: www" and switch to "2: IM" using mod+2 because somebody sent you a message. You don’t need to remember where you came from now, you can just press $mod+2 again to switch back to "1: www".

Syntax:

Example:

If an application on another workspace sets an urgency hint, switching to this workspace may lead to immediate focus of the application, which also means the window decoration color would be immediately reset to client.focused. This may make it unnecessarily hard to tell which window originally raised the event.

In order to prevent this, you can tell i3 to delay resetting the urgency state by a certain time using the force_display_urgency_hint directive. Setting the value to 0 disables this feature.

The default is 500ms.

Syntax:

Example:

By default i3 will just pass i3bar and let your shell handle the execution, searching your $PATH for a correct version. If you have a different i3bar somewhere or the binary is not in your $PATH you can tell i3 what to execute.

The specified command will be passed to sh -c, so you can use globbing and have to have correct quoting etc.

Syntax:

Example:

i3bar can run a program and display every line of its stdout output on the right hand side of the bar. This is useful to display system information like your current IP address, battery status or date/time.

The specified command will be passed to sh -c, so you can use globbing and have to have correct quoting etc.

Syntax:

Example:

You can either have i3bar be visible permanently at one edge of the screen (dock mode) or make it show up when you press your modifier key (hide mode). It is also possible to force i3bar to always stay hidden (invisible mode). The modifier key can be configured using the modifier option.

The mode option can be changed during runtime through the bar mode command. On reload the mode will be reverted to its configured value.

The hide mode maximizes screen space that can be used for actual windows. Also, i3bar sends the SIGSTOP and SIGCONT signals to the statusline process to save battery power.

Invisible mode allows to permanently maximize screen space, as the bar is never shown. Thus, you can configure i3bar to not disturb you by popping up because of an urgency hint or because the modifier key is pressed.

In order to control whether i3bar is hidden or shown in hide mode, there exists the hidden_state option, which has no effect in dock mode or invisible mode. It indicates the current hidden_state of the bar: (1) The bar acts like in normal hide mode, it is hidden and is only unhidden in case of urgency hints or by pressing the modifier key (hide state), or (2) it is drawn on top of the currently visible workspace (show state).

Like the mode, the hidden_state can also be controlled through i3, this can be done by using the bar hidden_state command.

The default mode is dock mode; in hide mode, the default modifier is Mod4 (usually the windows key). The default value for the hidden_state is hide.

Syntax:

Example:

Available modifiers are Mod1-Mod5, Shift, Control (see xmodmap(1)).

Specifies the bar ID for the configured bar instance. If this option is missing, the ID is set to bar-x, where x corresponds to the position of the embedding bar block in the config file (bar-0, bar-1, …).

Syntax:

Example:

This option determines in which edge of the screen i3bar should show up.

The default is bottom.

Syntax:

Example:

You can restrict i3bar to one or more outputs (monitors). The default is to handle all outputs. Restricting the outputs is useful for using different options for different outputs by using multiple bar blocks.

To make a particular i3bar instance handle multiple outputs, specify the output directive multiple times.

Syntax:

Example:

i3bar by default provides a system tray area where programs such as NetworkManager, VLC, Pidgin, etc. can place little icons.

You can configure on which output (monitor) the icons should be displayed or you can turn off the functionality entirely.

Syntax:

Example:

Note that you might not have a primary output configured yet. To do so, run:

Specifies the font to be used in the bar. See [fonts].

Syntax:

Example:

Specifies whether workspace buttons should be shown or not. This is useful if you want to display a statusline-only bar containing additional information.

The default is to show workspace buttons.

Syntax:

Example:

Specifies whether workspace numbers should be displayed within the workspace buttons. This is useful if you want to have a named workspace that stays in order on the bar according to its number without displaying the number prefix.

When strip_workspace_numbers is set to yes, any workspace that has a name of the form "[n]:[NAME]" will display only the name. You could use this, for instance, to display Roman numerals rather than digits by naming your workspaces to "1:I", "2:II", "3:III", "4:IV", …

The default is to display the full name within the workspace button.

Syntax:

Example:

Specifies whether the current binding mode indicator should be shown or not. This is useful if you want to hide the workspace buttons but still be able to see the current binding mode indicator. For an example of a mode definition, see [resizingconfig].

The default is to show the mode indicator.

Syntax:

Example:

As with i3, colors are in HTML hex format (#rrggbb). The following colors can be configured at the moment:

Syntax:

Example (default colors):

What good is a window manager if you can’t actually start any applications? The exec command starts an application by passing the command you specify to a shell. This implies that you can use globbing (wildcards) and programs will be searched in your $PATH.

Syntax:

Example:

The --no-startup-id parameter disables startup-notification support for this particular exec command. With startup-notification, i3 can make sure that a window appears on the workspace on which you used the exec command. Also, it will change the X11 cursor to watch (a clock) while the application is launching. So, if an application is not startup-notification aware (most GTK and Qt using applications seem to be, though), you will end up with a watch cursor for 60 seconds.

The split command makes the current window a split container. Split containers can contain multiple windows. Depending on the layout of the split container, new windows get placed to the right of the current one (splith) or new windows get placed below the current one (splitv).

If you apply this command to a split container with the same orientation, nothing will happen. If you use a different orientation, the split container’s orientation will be changed (if it does not have more than one window). Use layout toggle split to change the layout of any split container from splitv to splith or vice-versa.

Syntax:

Example:

Use layout toggle split, layout stacking, layout tabbed, layout splitv or layout splith to change the current container layout to splith/splitv, stacking, tabbed layout, splitv or splith, respectively.

To make the current window (!) fullscreen, use fullscreen, to make it floating (or tiling again) use floating enable respectively floating disable (or floating toggle):

Syntax:

Examples: