Here is a couple of extra bits to improve your i3 experience. I use these additions myself.

rofi; https://davedavenport.github.io/rofi/ . I’ve been using rofi as an alternative to dmenu for about a year now. I love it!

If you’re not familiar with dmenu. dmenu is a keyboard-driven menu utility developed as part of the dwm project. When invoked, usually by a user-configured key combination, dmenu displays a horizontal menu of its stdin stream at the top edge of the screen. It works but feels old. rofi is an alternative with some nice extras. It includes a window-switcher. This lets you search and change windows with ease. It is also easier to customize; both visually and functionally.

The bottom bit is rofi.

i3blocks; https://github.com/vivien/i3blocks. i3blocks is a highly flexible status line for the i3 window manager. It handles clicks, signals and language-agnosticuser scripts. In other words it makes it super convenient to customize your i3bar.

The top bit is i3blocks.