Want to switch up Xfce4 with I3WM?

So now that Arch Linux has been installed with the complete Xfce4 desktop, one can take the time to play a bit with settings or enjoy the satisfying task of becoming closer to be a linux ninja. Now with this experience of a challenge with Arch, let's switch it up with installing I3WM and customize it to be suitable for whatever we need it, even without a lot of distractions. We'll continue from where everything but the complete desktop is installed. We'll start out with sudo pacman -S pavucontrol pulseaudio-alsa xorg xorg-xinit xorg-server mesa xterm i3-wm zsh rofi kitty firefox. We will ignore installing any desktop manager primarily because we want the terminal to execute our desktop or wm directly upon login, just because we can and because it does look so much cooler to simply enter our username and password and everything will start automatically. As these softwares are installed, we need to create a file that will start up i3 the moment we type in startx instead of xorg. Sudo nano .xinitrc and add the line exec i3 before pressing ctrl+x and save the file. Once typed startx, i3 should start up asking us if we want to create a config file to our home directory. Accept this and move forward into our I3WM. As we enter I3 you should press window key and return simultanious to enter our xterm which was installed alongside the rest of our dearly needed software. It is at this point we can make some changes to out i3 configure file located at ~.config/i3/config, so choose sudo nano ~.config/i3/config and look for the terminal called i3-sensible-terminal. Personally I'm using kitty so I'll replace the name accordingly. Next up would be to fetch a few files before moving forward, we'll be switching between two different config files to set up our system so it will look alot nicer than what I3WM does out of the box. Sudo pacman -S wget git. Once these are installed, we're gonna fetch an additional software to our zsh. I've used Oh-My-Zsh so this will be the referance for this, select switching to zsh after install and the config file will be added to your homefolder. To edit the zsh file type sudo nano .zshrc, scroll down to preferred editor section and add the following after the uncommented selection if [[ -z $(pidof Xorg) ]]; then startx fi. At the bottom you can add screenfetch/neofetch if one or the other is prefered and install this once you've saved the config file. Back in your I3WM config file, just below the key binding for your terminal you'd probably want to add the following line, #Thunar bindsym+t exec thunar, find dmenu and uncomment that to replace it with bindsym $mod+d exec --no-startup-id rofi -show drun. Before saving this we'll add some gaps to this setup so it doesn't look like every window is glued together. At the bottom add #Gaps gaps outer 10 gaps inner 10 and save and exit out of the file. Now we did add one key binding for a software we haven't installed yet, so let's sudo pacman -S thunar. With a ctrl+shift+c and ctrl+shift+r we'll update and reload I3WM, so let's see if windows key + d gives us a menu listing, and swap the d with the t to see if thunar will open up. If neofetch or screenfetch was added to the zshrc config file, open up your terminal to see if it gives you your system information in terminal. If everything as worked out this far, reboot and see if you automatically is logged into I3WM after you password. We'll install yay by following the second step here. Personally I like bumblebee-status over the I3-status so let's install that as well. Have a look here on how to install bumblebee-status and after this we'll install powerline-fonts by typing sudo pacman -S powerline-fonts. In our I3 config file we'll add a few lines so that when we refresh or restart our system bumblebee-status will be our selected statusbar. bar { font pango:Inconsolata 10 position top tray_output primary status_command /usr/share/bumblebee-status/bumblebee-status -m disk:/home cpu \ memory battery date time pasink pasource\ -p root.path=/ time.format="%H:%M CW %V" date.format="%a, %b %d %Y" \ -t solarized-powerline } Remember to uncomment the three lines of I3status so it doesn't appear at all. And by that you should have a system that does a fabioulus job not only by it's looks, but functionality as well. I wish you the best in this Linux journey to be closer to a computer ninja.