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Differences from i3

Simon Ser edited this page Feb 25, 2023 · 16 revisions
  • Sway is a Wayland compositor (duh)
  • You can use your floating_modifier to resize and move tiled windows
  • Sway handles things like output configuration (rather than something like xrandr)
  • Sway supports multiple non-modifier keys when assigning key bindings (see Shortcut handling)
  • The default keybindings in sway are different from those in i3. Read your sway config to learn them, or copy over your i3 config to use what you're used to.
  • Sway handles your wallpaper
  • Sway handles input configuration (man sway-input)
  • Sway is documented through man pages, rather than the website
  • A few i3 commands only make sense on X11 and aren't present in sway
  • You may occasionally run into minor inconsistencies between sway syntax and i3 syntax. Just tweak your commands to be a bit more explicit if necessary
  • i3lock forks into the background when run. For swaylock, this behavior has to be explicitly requested via -f
  • i3 has support to export a layout and to restore it (or parts of it), sway only has export, no import.
  • More stuff, some which are listed in this reddit post.