I've done deep dives into software as I've needed it, and even just the very surface level of familiarity with i3 was plenty to get enough of a performance boost that the WM was not what was limiting my productivity. At that point, why spend more time optimizing it?
I did daily drive it for a while on my laptop, and highly enjoyed being able to set up workspaces complete for different uses at the touch of a button, but I don't need that days, and didn't do much useful work when I did use it.
Edit: A big part of this is that the machines I use i3/Sway on these day's are really just single purpose machines that I don't do enough different things on to justify refreshing workspace management in my head. I find just being able to sanely open/manipulate open terminals is enough.
Given the asynchronicity of developer's life, I usually create a workspace for any microtask I have. And the workspace/microtask automatically dies whenever it no longer contains any window.
Even looking for information on stack overflow is now a workspace in my workflow.
(Because workspaces are so cheap).
After some weeks living like this, i see that some microtask survive for a surpisingly long time, and my workspace management has evolved into a kind of poor's man task manager.
The fantastic side-effect of a workspace tied to a task is that the windows, history, URLs are ready to use instantly. Which makes cognitive load when task switching a breeze.
I've done deep dives into software as I've needed it, and even just the very surface level of familiarity with i3 was plenty to get enough of a performance boost that the WM was not what was limiting my productivity. At that point, why spend more time optimizing it?
I did daily drive it for a while on my laptop, and highly enjoyed being able to set up workspaces complete for different uses at the touch of a button, but I don't need that days, and didn't do much useful work when I did use it.
Edit: A big part of this is that the machines I use i3/Sway on these day's are really just single purpose machines that I don't do enough different things on to justify refreshing workspace management in my head. I find just being able to sanely open/manipulate open terminals is enough.