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 is the optional dependencies perl-AnyEvent-I3.
It is required for i3's new layout saving/restoring features.