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I want to set up i3 automatically start on a specific one of my three screens (all connected to one Nvidia card). This has proved more difficult than expected.

  • My first choice was to just set that specific screen (HDMI) to be the main screen via GRUB options. However, it seems that is not possible with proprietary Nvidia drivers, which I need to use. So I gave up on that and only included it here as background. https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/can-i-choose-which-monitor-is-primary-as-in-gets-the-tty-login-for-gt710/197021

  • My second choice is to just startx automatically at boot and have it start i3 on the screen of my choice. I have already configured X screens so that I can address my displays like :0.0, 0.1, 0.2.

  • At first I tried to get i3 on the display of my choice by DISPLAY=:0.2 startx, but obviously that doesn't work because the displays have not yet been assigned as X has not yet started.

  • I thought I would try specifying the display by modifying the script that invokes i3, which I expected to be /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc. However I see nothing about i3 there, or in any of the other places I expected to find it such as /etc/profile or /etc/X11/Xsession. Grepping inside /etc/X11 and my home folder for exec i3 yielded nothing. So where is i3 actually being invoked when I run startx?

  • Next, I tried DISPLAY=:0.2 sudo xinit i3. That opens up i3 on the main display, but with with an xterm window for the i3 process. If I quit this window, i3 closes. So this it wastes screen space on a window that I won't interact with.

So my questions are:

  1. How do I start i3 with a command and have it open with the same result as when I run startx?
  2. Where can I find the command which startx uses to invoke i3?

Solution (but not answer)

I get the desired effect by creating ~/.xinitrc with DISPLAY=0.2 exec i3. However I am still curious how i3 was being invoked before. I would rather have made this change there. And why does i3 need to be started with exec instead of xinit?

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  • X startup is very flexible, but this can make it complicated to figure out. Do you have a ~/.xsession file? Do you have a ~/.startxrc file? Start with the manual page for startx and look at the files it references. See if /usr/bin/x-session-manager exists and if so does it link to /etc/alternatives. Typically you have a session manager started by startx as the client and it will start your window manager (i3 in your case). Commented Dec 4, 2021 at 0:43
  • @icarus no, I have neither of them. That's what is bothering me. I cannot find theexec i3 command in any of the usual suspects. Commented Dec 4, 2021 at 0:55
  • Perhaps /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc is looking a var called WINDOWMANAGER which sets it, and it is being set via /etc/profile.d/profile.sh. Commented Dec 4, 2021 at 11:17

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