i3 is a tiling window manager, completely written from scratch.
i3 was created because wmii, our favorite window manager at the time,
didn't provide some features we wanted (multi-monitor done right,
for example), had some bugs, didn't progress since quite some time and
wasn't easy to hack at all (source code comments/documentation completely
lacking). Still, we think the wmii developers and contributors did a
great job. Thank you for inspiring us to create i3.
Please be aware that i3 is primarily targeted at advanced users and
developers.
i3status is optional, but useful to provide a system status
bar. As of v4.8 there are 3 new optional dependencies:
perl-JSON-XS, perl-AnyEvent, perl-AnyEvent-I3. They are required
for i3's new layout saving/restoring features.