Can Enlightenment be a fancy alternative to the i3 WM with same keyboard productivity?

Question

So, the i3 WM is a great WM in productivity matter. It's primary focus is to allow users to do a lot of things without need to touch mouse:

• easily navigate between windows, and workspaces
• easily organize windows:
  • create container(tabs,vertical/horizontal layout)
  • move windows between containers, and to another workspace

I work mostly with applications controlled via keyboard. I use a lot of workspaces. So, things mentioned above help allows me to work much faster.

However, sometimes I work only using a mouse and I would like to have WM/DE that is also mouse-friendly.

Is it possible to setup Enlightenment that it keeps all "keyboard features" of i3 WM? (+ mouse friendliness and fancy look)

Answer 1

Enlightenment can do some tiling but currently not to the level of other tiling window managers such as i3, Currently you can select whether your next window will float, or be horizontally or vertically tiled. There is no way to create containers or layouts in e19.

Having said that the main reason i use enlightenment is the Virtual Desktop (Workspace) support. It is easy to set up bindings to swap windows between virtual desktops. Unlike most DE's enlightenment allows you to change virtual desktops interdependently per screen or optionally on all screens at the same time. It is also easy to setup bindings to move windows between screens.

In your case it will come down to how much of your container workflow you can replicate with virtual desktops, the tiling will go some of the way but is probably more limited then your used to.

Having said that if enlightenment doesn't do enough for you at the moment, come back and check in a release or 2 there is still work ongoing in the tiling area See https://phab.enlightenment.org/w/emodules/tiling2/ for more info.