i3 window manager

Raised as a usability problem by 20 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2013–2025), in 15 threads.

People raised many different problems with i3 window manager, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 21 complaints

Tiled windows end up with useless or scrambled resolutions making content hard to use2025-12-07
Popup windows steal keyboard input when user has switched workspaces2025-08-12
No easy keyboard way to return to previously used window on same workspace2024-03-13
Floating windows must be moved and resized manually, and Firefox took 15 seconds to fit the screen2023-06-18
No way to temporarily maximise a window while keeping the status bar visible2023-01-07
Display management under i3 on X11 is a little painful2021-12-16
Default tiled layout leaves each window too little space with several open2021-09-06
Tray icons disappear or show wrong size when switching screens2021-09-06
Dynamic tiling makes quickly resizing or swapping windows more cumbersome2020-12-18
Tiling layout doesn't fit GIMP's many small toolbox windows2020-12-16
Brightness, volume, locking and display hotplug need manual hunting and fiddling to work2020-12-16
Reordering windows in a workspace feels like solving a Rubik's Cube2020-12-16
Must learn a config language with hundreds of options just to move windows2020-12-16
Commenter finds it impossible to use other people's computers after getting used to i32020-12-16
Flickering and graphical artifacts when going fullscreen across multiple monitors2020-06-08
Must click a window to focus it, can't type in an unfocused window2020-02-17
Keyboard switching between tabbed PDFs requires cycling through all tabs, not jumping to the Nth one2020-02-11
Basic features don't work by default and need blog posts to configure2019-12-27
Moving windows with keyboard shortcuts is a pain, so the user reaches for the mouse2018-01-04
Simple settings like time zone need symlinks and restarting several processes to take effect2017-01-03
Windows get focus lazily, and the user can't work out how to change it2013-10-17