Automatic floating windows in i3

The i3 window manager is a fast window manager that helps you keep all of your applications in the right place. It automatically tiles windows and can manage those tiles across multiple virtual desktops.

However, there are certain applications that I really prefer in a floating window. Floating windows do not get tiled and they can easily be dragged around with your mouse. They’re the type of windows you expect to see on other non-tiling desktops such as GNOME or KDE.

Convert a window to floating temporarily #

If you have an existing window that you prefer to float, select that window and press Mod + Shift + Space bar. The window will pop up in front of the tiled windows and you can easily move it with your mouse.

Depending on your configuration, you may be able to resize it by grabbing a corner of the window with your mouse. You can also assign a key combination for resizing in your i3 configuration file (usually ~/.config/i3/config):

# resize window (you can also use the mouse for that)
mode "resize" {
        bindsym Left resize shrink width 10 px or 10 ppt
        bindsym Down resize grow height 10 px or 10 ppt
        bindsym Up resize shrink height 10 px or 10 ppt
        bindsym Right resize grow width 10 px or 10 ppt
        bindsym Return mode "default"
        bindsym Escape mode "default"
        bindsym $mod+r mode "default"
}
bindsym $mod+r mode "resize"

With this configuration, simply press Mod + r and use the arrow keys to grow or shrink the window’s borders.

Always float certain windows #

For those windows that you always want to be floating no matter what, i3 has a solution for that, too. Just tell i3 how to identify your windows and ensure floating enable appears in the i3 config:

for_window [window_role="About"] floating enable
for_window [class="vlc"] floating enable
for_window [title="Authy"] floating enable

In the example above, I have a few windows always set to be floating:

• [window_role="About"] - Any of the “About” windows in various applications that are normally opened by Help -> About.
• [class="vlc"] - The VLC media player can be a good one to float if you need to stuff it away in a corner.
• [title="Authy"] - Authy’s chrome extension looks downright silly as a tiled window.

Any time these windows are spawned, they will automatically appear as floating windows. You can always switch them back to tiled manually by pressing Mod + Shift + Space bar.

Identifying windows #

Identifying windows in the way that i3 cares about can be challenging. Knowing when to use window_role or class for a window isn’t very intuitive. Fortunately, there’s a great script from an archived i3 faq thread that makes this easy:

Download this script to your system, make it executable (chmod +x i3-get-window-criteria), and run it. As soon as you do that, a plus (+) icon will replace your normal mouse cursor. Click on the window you care about and look for the output in your terminal where you ran the i3-get-window-criteria script.

On my system, clicking on a terminator terminal window gives me:

[class="Terminator" id=37748743 instance="terminator" title="major@indium:~"]

If I wanted to float all terminator windows, I could add this to my i3 configuration file:

for_window [class="Terminator"] floating enable

Float in a specific workspace #

Do you need a window to always float on a specific workspace? i3 can do that, too!

Let’s go back to the example with VLC. Let’s consider that we have a really nice 4K display where we always want to watch movies and that’s where workspace 2 lives. We can tell i3 to always float the VLC window on workspace 2 with this configuration:

set $ws1 "1: main"
set $ws2 "2: 4kdisplay"
for_window [class="vlc"] floating enable
for_window [class="vlc"] move to workspace $ws2

Restart i3 to pick up the new changes (usually Mod + Shift + R) and start VLC. It should appear on workspace 2 as a floating window!