Repeatedly reaching for your mouse slows you down in the short term, and in the long term brings on health problems (RSI). To stay fast and healthy, keep your hands on your keyboard. To keep your hands there, this series, “Look ma, no mouse!” will guide you through easy to use tools to use your keyboard to control your computer instead of your mouse.
In this piece, we’ll discuss how to use your keyboard for one of the most mouse intensive activities: window management.
Why is window management so mouse intensive?
Window repositioning, and to a lesser extent resizing.
Switching windows can be done easily with the keyboard using Alt+Tab if you have less than 10 windows open at a time, which is 99% of the time.
Solution? A keyboard first window manager.
i3
i3 is a keyboard first, tiling window manager available only on Linux. There are keyboard first, tiling window managers for Windows (bug.n) and macOS (Amethyst) that work well, but today we’re just covering i3.
Instead of windows looking …