i3 theming?

i3 n00b here. How do I make i3 not look like shit?

I really don't understand the desire for aesthetics while using a tiling wm. The whole idea is efficiency, rice is counter to that. anyways transparency on your terminals, conky, color schemes.

I use all the goodies with ratpoison because I want my desktop to look nice. Nothing more, nothing less. A classy wall, transparent terminals and a dank color scheme make life more livable if you have to be stuck in front of a monitor 8 hours a day.

My i3 desktop isn't all that fancy, but it looks pretty nice imo. I just use zenburn colors on the titlebars and borders + zenburn themes for urxvt and emacs. Not on my main machine at the moment otherwise I'd post a screenshot. I can upload my dotfiles if you're interested.

>>13990 Except aesthetics and efficency don't have to contradict each other. If you strive for minimal, clean aesthetics, it very much complements an efficent tiling wm.

>>13990 Consider this, too: I spend anywhere between 6 and 16 hours a day banging my head against a wall in front of a computer screen, dealing with clients who 'need' some mythical application that's one million lines long, but they need it tomorrow, and they'll happily pay me $5. I spend a LOT of time in front of this thing, and effeciency is NOT everything, especially since I spend much of my time simply staring at my screen in abject confusion (if you don't properly comment your code, I hope you get eaten alive by a crazed dolphin on meth), wondering precisely why there are comments like //program begins here, but LITERALLY nothing else.

>>14010 I'm so sorry :(

Related, I seem to be retarded and can't get ibus and anthy working with i3. How do I do this?

>>13990 Keyboard usage is another reason to use tiling WM's. It's a lot faster.

>>13990 Rice (or lack of) and efficiency aren't mutually exclusive.

>>13989 All that you need: > a good workflow > colors and font you are comfortable with > a bar (I prefer lemonbar) > a menu (dmenu is p gud) > very small or no gaps at all you might also wanna check out nixers.net or blog.z3bra.org for guides

>>14010 >>14039 Yeah, I didn't mean a tiling manager or setting up a workflow that's good/efficient for you. I use i3 and I've spent a decent amount of time setting up hotkeys, layouts, etc. and a lot fuarrrking around with emacs, making everything how I want it. I use coordinated color schemes for my terminal/editor. I see images posted like the ones in OP though and it's like... why? The translucent one just makes everything harder to see and I imagine that guy spends his whole time running apt-get and screenfetch and maybe checking his email. Same with the others. A huge ass clock on the desktop, all that fuarrrking spacing between windows, the stupid icons on the bar. The other one with music/twitter/rss/email. It triggers me.

>>14047 Window spacing in a TWM like i3 totally defeats the point in my opinion. Efficiency and maximising screen real estate is why I use i3 personally so adding spacing to that seems stupid to me. But, whatever floats your boat I guess.

Does anyone know how to convert an arbitrary string of unicode into a string of escape seqences like \u3e43? I made a bash script that returns the name of the playing song but i3blocks displays non-ascii or non-utf8 characters as dots, but understands unicode escape sequences.

>>14047 >people using software the way they want triggers me