Desktop Programs to Use with i3

answered 2014-08-23 15:15:04 +0000

nsnwu
11 ●3

updated 2014-08-23 15:17:04 +0000

• Automount / File Manager

udiskie is a very nice automounter (with optional tray icon). I highly recommend ranger as a file manager, gorgeous software - well worth getting to know. As mentioned it doesn't automount but there's no need to conflate these tasks.

• PDF Reader

Seconding zathura (I'm using it with the nice mupdf rendering backend) - contrary to smlx's answer it does have printing etc.

• Network Manager

Check out connman. It's fast and light, although I can't recommend a specific frontend, the GTK one is OK but not great.

answered 2014-08-23 10:00:04 +0000

smlx
1

I went through a similar process a few years ago when first switching to a tiling WM. Here's what I've settled on:

• file manager with automount support - I use spacefm-gtk3; it uses udisks for automount. But thunar or pcmanfm are also good options (both use gvfs). Also check out ranger for a cool CLI file manager (though it doesn't do automount).

• network manager - I just installed network-manager-gnome. At some point, if you want the functionality you'll just have to install the dependencies (and the dependencies aren't too bad..).

• sound manager - I use pasystray - full pulseaudio control from the system tray.

• image viewer - I use sxiv - it's the vim of image viewers.

• PDF reader - zathura is great to quickly read small documents, but on the occasions that I need the extra features (like print, table of contents), I use evince.

There were also some other features I missed from a full DE:

• Clipboard manager - I use parcellite.

• Notification daemon. dunst is too simple for my liking. For example it doesn't handle multi-head setups well, and custom placement of notifications isn't possible. I use xfce4-notifyd instead.

• Power management - very handy for a laptop. I use xfce4-powermanager.

Note: I've used the Debian package names, but most should be available in other distros.

answered 2014-08-18 17:15:47 +0000

blendi
44 ●4 ●4 ●10

file manager with automount support: - Thunar with volman (just launch "thunar --deamon" on start)

PDF reader: - if u use firefox as ur Browser u can use Firefox for pdf's

answered 2014-08-22 12:26:09 +0000

Kaligule
27 ●5 ●6 ●10

Network manager

In my config on I use:

# network manager (always runs)
# (I have no idea why --no-startup-id might be a clever choice, it is used on various websites)
exec nm-applet

nm-applet is nice since it fits great into my i3bar and does have a nice clickable menu if you want that

File Manager with automount

Sorry, never used one.

PDF

I like okular, but some friends of mine tell me that mupdf is more "pure unix". There are around 10^10^10 pdfviewer out there, choose one.

Sound

Like ANOKNUSA said before it is not hard to create shortcuts for this. I use exactly his lines of code in my configuration file.

answered 2014-08-18 15:41:04 +0000

ANOKNUSA
536 ●3 ●11 ●20

List of desktop-agnostic applications

Volume control:

bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec amixer set Master 5%+ unmute
bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume exec amixer set Master 5%- unmute
bindsym XF86AudioMute exec amixer set Master nmute

And I'll tell you a little secret about software: Power, versatility, low resource usage and a light code base almost never go hand-in-hand with dumbed-down convenience. Automatically mounting external drives is a good example. Any file manager that includes that as a feature is almost certainly going to be part of a desktop environment, or at least will not be any lighter than what you'd find in one from a desktop environment. If you want the lightest file management solution you'll have to do without auto-mounting---unless you're willing to write your own udev rules, or use any of the handful of third-party scripts to automount outside the file manager that are floating around.

answered 2014-08-22 21:07:21 +0000

cee
1192 ●12 ●28 ●50 http://andreatta.ch/

Here are my 2cents:
I like my computer plain and simple, but I still want all the goodies. ;-)

So here are some of my currently used "desktop" programs

filemanager

pcmanfm
It's great to acces any samba share with gvfs-smb

network manager

nm-applet

sound manager

set $psst --no-startup-id
set $update && killall -SIGUSR1 i3status
bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume    exec $psst pactl set-sink-volume 1 -- -5% && pactl set-sink-mute 1 0 $update
bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume    exec $psst pactl set-sink-volume 1 -- +5% && pactl set-sink-mute 1 0 $update
bindsym XF86AudioMute           exec $psst pactl set-sink-mute 1 toggle $update

Only use the multimedia keys from my notebook.

image viewer

feh

pdf viewer

I used to use apvlv, no switched to zathura and I am very happy with it. Both viewers support vim keybindings, what more could you ask for.