Install I3 on OpenBSD
By Ronald Valente. Published
In this post I will be going over the i3wm setup I have on my OpenBSD development/admin machine. If you need to setup an OpenBSD machine, you can follow my Install OpenBSD post.
Note: In this post I remove all X components from the install, so skip that step if this will be a dev machine and you want a UI.
Installation
First, lets install i3
doas pkg_add i3
Configuration
Now, create an .i3status.conf
file in your homedir.
You can either use the default, located here /usr/local/share/examples/i3status/i3status.conf
.
Or write your own, using the i3status.conf as a starting point.
Now, Create your ~/.xinitrc
to start i3 when X starts.
echo "i3" > ~/.xinitrc
Terminal Emulator
If you want to use something other than xterm
then I recommend urxvt
. Start off by installing rxvt-unicode.
pkg_add rxvt-unicode
Now let's tell i3 to use urxvt instead of xterm
--- i3old Sun Aug 19 14:08:00 2018
+++ i3new Sun Aug 19 14:08:07 2018
@@ -30,7 +30,7 @@
floating_modifier $mod
# start a terminal
-bindsym $mod+Return exec /usr/X11R6/bin/xterm
+bindsym $mod+Return exec /usr/local/bin/urxvt
# kill focused window
bindsym $mod+Shift+q kill
Now, when you run startx
you UI will start and prompt you the first time for a couple configuration options.
Congratulations, you now have i3 running with urxvt!