Recommendations for customizing vim & i3 for programming workflow?
Do you have any settings/plugins you prefer?
Also, any nice ideas for compiling latex docs while writing it in vim? Like a side by side thing maybe, not really looking for ide.

First of all, I recommend neovim instead of vim, it has better plugin support.
I'd suggest YouCompleteMe, UltiSnips, and Plug as plugins.

For i3, I'd say rofi as appmenu, lxappearance for theme-settings,
xfce4-terminal as terminal.

I'm using vimtex and just open zathura next to vim. Compilation is done with a makefile and vim-dispatch. Vim is running inside tmux, so :Make opens another tmux split and closes it automatically if compilation succeeds.

I use nvim (which is weird considering my name) with deoplete (completion), but I’m thinking of maybe trying coc.vim. Neomake for building and error checking. Vim-airline is pretty good, and it allows to view buffers. I also have lots of other plugins I don’t remember (plugin manager I use is vim-plug).

For i3 (I use sway, an i3 compatible wayland compositor, but I’ve used i3 too before, so it kind of applies): I use rofi as app launcher and pywal as a theme engine (although wpgtk is maybe more feature packed).

i3-gaps is pretty cool.

r/unixporn has some great aesthetics, but looking at r/usabilityporn is maybe more useful.

---[==]

@7400 Why not use vimtex' integrated autocompile feature? Works flawlessly with muPDF and Zathura

@gathurian: TBH, I never really tried it. I like the control I have with makefiles and for larger projects (individually built figures, etc.) it becomes necessary.