Using the i3 tiling window manager with XFCE services

Since around a year or two I've been using i3 tiling window manager together with the xfce4 services as my desktop environment and I'm quite content with the result. The i3-wm can be installed on top of the xfce4 DE without any package conflicts. Such a combination allows to have both DE at the same time and share common settings and applications between them.

I can't remember exactly why I have chosen the i3-wm as my window manager but maybe it's because I have read that i3-wm has vim style movement keyboard shortcuts. As far as I'm a vim user I decided to 'take it for a spin'.

Sound volume change notifications using pynotify

As I started to use the i3 window manager I wanted to have a visual feedback on sound volume change events. Usually it's done by a daemon that binds to specific keyboard combinations to adjust volume and to send notifications to a notify daemon. In xfce this is done by the xfce4-volumed. I should also point here to other lightweight volume daemons like volnoti or pa-applet. Without a dedicated daemon it is also pretty much simple to handle sound volume keys by a simple bash script which is bind to specific keyboard combinations.