How do you make i3 pick up resizing the vmware window?

Michael
3081 ●13 ●28 ●50 http://i3wm.org/

When using i3 inside a virtual machine (vmware), you can resize the vmware window, but i3 doesn’t react to that change. Furthermore, after restarting i3 inplace, workspace 1 vanishes.

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answered Jun 4 '12

Michael
3081 ●13 ●28 ●50 http://i3wm.org/

This is due to a bug in the vmware X11 driver. When i3 starts up, XRandR is not available, and thus i3 falls back on not using XRandR. However, after the first change to the configuration (for example by resizing), XRandR becomes available. Thus, the inplace restart has a different setup before and afterwards, and that leads to workspace 1 getting lost.

To workaround this issue, you can issue an xrandr call in your ~/.xsession file:

#!/bin/sh
xrandr
exec i3

Comments

This worked for me but the resizing functionality would enable more quickly if I also used the `exec vmware-user --no-startup-id` setting in `~/.i3/config` as mentioned in another answer.