Before this commit, i3 used key bindings in SYNC mode for bindings
like Mode_switch + <a> and replayed the key if the current state
did not include Mode_switch. This had some problems:
1) The WM needed to acknowledge much more key presses than you
actually had bindings for, thus making the system a bit laggy
sometimes.
2) Users of layouts who constantly type in the third level (like
russian layouts) did not get their cyrillic symbols correctly
(they were not replayed right), neither did the keybindings
work in both modes.
So, the current implementation uses the following approach: XKB
provides an event which contains the current state (including
the current level). i3 signs up for this event and upon receival,
it re-maps the bindings using Mode_switch (enables them when the
level goes to the third level and disables them as soon as the
level goes back to normal). This fixes both problems.
Add --force-xinerama when starting i3 to use Xinerama instead of RandR.
This should *ONLY* be done if you have no other choice (nvidia’s
binary driver uses twinview and does not expose the monitor information
through RandR).
Please note that rdesktop’s -g workarea option will not work on
64-bit systems at the moment because of a bug in rdesktop (see the
rdesktop-devel mailing list).
For example, you can create a mode which will let you resize windows
with some easy to use keys. So, instead of binding a combination
of your homerow and modifiers to resize, like this:
bind Mod4+44 resize right +10
bind Mod4+45 resize right -10
...
You can instead define a new mode:
mode "resize" {
bind 44 resize right +10
bind 45 resize right -10
...
bind 36 mode default
}
bindsym Mod4+r mode resize
So, if you press Mod4+r now, your keybindings will be set to the ones
defined in your resize mode above. You can then use your homerow
(without any other modifier) to resize the current column/row and
press enter to go back to the default mode when you are done.
Note that using this option requires you to enable the new lexer/parser
by passing the -l flag to i3 when starting.
Use "bindsym" instead of "bind". You have to use the names of keys
as in xmodmap. To get a list of currently bounud symbols, use
xmodmap -pke
Technical quirk: Xlib generated MappingNotify events upon
XkbMapNotify events (from XKB, as the name says). XCB does not yet
have support for XKB, thus we need to select and handle the event
by ourself. Hopefully, this will change in the future.
Michael Stapelberg