<window> <active-border-color> <window>
<window> <active-border-color> <gap> <inactive-border-color> <window>
I have always assumed i3-gaps was just an aesthetic thing. How does the gap let you know what window is focused?
I've spent at least the last 6 years removing i3 and installing i3-gaps on all my new machines (and having to comment out gaps in my dotfiles/i3config while I do it). I didn't think I'd ever see this merge. This is awesome!
What's the difference between borders and gaps?
https://github.com/mikelward/conf/blob/main/config/compton.c...
Tried also transparency and it really does not work for me either.
Both Windows and MacOs do not such thing. How do gaps make a WM look like it belongs to this decade?
I mean if we use Windows as a standard, the way to tell which decade we’re in is by counting the number of totally different UI styles we have, right?
these days with high resolution monitors it can be nice to have a background and some gaps / transparency.
Well tweaking a Linux desktop for a few developers is the only so-called 'use case'. I don't see the point of it or messing around with config files and creating rube goldberg contraptions only for it to break again on a desktop update. This is even before mentioning that it is still using the prehistoric and insecure X11 windowing system.
Quite a pointless nothing if you ask me, when you start using a system that just works like macOS or Windows to get things done rather than fighting with system components and window managers to begin getting things done.
nobody asked you
It appears that some Linux Desktop fans here cannot handle it or even give a rebuttal other than cheap emotional swipes like this.
You can do better than that in your next reply.
Refuted what?
Pretending to refute something isn't a refutation, especially when you're being very emotional about it. There is also no need to be very upset either.
Try again.
I don't care about the shovels that you sell to developers, and you shouldn't care that some people want to have a little fun with their desktop. You don't do that. Fine, we get it. You made that extremely clear several times.
There is nothing to refute. We don't agree with you, we don't care about your opinion, and we're tired of hearing it.
Yes it is.
> I don't care about the shovels that you sell to developers, and you shouldn't care that some people want to have a little fun with their desktop. You don't do that, and don't think it's a "real" use-case. Fine, we get it. You made that extremely clear several times.
Clearly stating the reason why Desktop Linux support is eternally ill defined due to the moving parts of the desktop stack is the whole point of this, and no serious person would accept or cater support to a tiny minority of complaining Linux users to fix their highly tweaked non-standard desktop because they messed around with their dotfiles.
> There is nothing to refute. We don't agree with you, we don't care about your opinion, and we're tired of hearing it.
Who exactly is we? You don't speak for the one pretending to 'refute' my claims about the Linux Desktop ecosystem. They can explain why for themselves.
My claims about the Linux Desktop in my comments remain irrefutable, an evergreen fact and still no rebuttal to it exists because it is the truth.
At least I know not to buy your crappy "shovels". You clearly can't manufacture them to handle real world cases - let me guess they are the type of shovel that can only be used to shovel sand, and if some impurity, say a mote of dust, lands on your sand pile, it will destroy the shovel and you'll go rant about how the real problem is a lack of "standards" for sand instead of doing the reasonable thing and make a product that isn't just cleverly shaped trash.
There is no complicated contraption here. A couple tens of thousands of lines of code that makes arranging windows in any way you want completely effortless is a useful piece of software. Your window manager that just works probably uses more lines of code just for its animations.
Ignoring the combination matrix of Linux desktop distros combined with the multiple non-standard components in the desktop stack excluding the kernel (which is the only standard component) is an order of magnitude of complexity, qualifying the implementation, level of support, and testing and as a 'complicated contraption', including this project.
> Different people use their computer differently with different pieces of software and have different needs.
With the giant difference being how 'software support' is defined which for almost all Linux Desktop distros out there, is no standard distro meaning it being an ill defined, free for all.
e.g. see: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/
This is not an invalid use-case. Not everybody wants to be 100% focused on productivity to the exclusion of absolutely everything else.
If you want to have something as simple as a background image, the only way you're going to be able to see it when using a tiling window manager is with gaps or transparency. Small gaps is arguably less intrusive than transparency.
There's a small footnote to this, but I think it's true enough to say it like that.
When I came to Linux I quickly got into the unixporn community. After a bit of making Ubuntu look nice, I discovered i3. I then found the gaps patch and rebased it onto the latest version of i3 at the time. Lots of unixporn people liked that and asked me to create a repository for it, so I did -- and i3-gaps was born.
The reason I say it's true enough to say it was born on unixporn is that it's where "a gaps patch" turned into "i3-gaps", and also I reworked so much of that initial small patch that it became something new essentially.
To each to their own then, whilst I continue to sell shovels to developers and turn over another ten to twenty thousand dollars a month for only that.
At least I know why I cannot define Linux Desktop support and have to draw the line on the most used and standard of desktop distros.
Okay?
So explaining the truth of not supporting complicated prehistoric contraptions is somehow upsetting to folks emotionally attached to their desktops?
EDIT:
Also with your own edits it really does show that the truth indeed hurts those that can't handle it when you are all over the place:
>> What the fuck are you talking about?
Getting very upset and angry. Causing one to sway into irrationality and reduced reading comprehension such as:
>> But saying there's no use-case is crazy .. can you not read?
There is 'little to no use-case' and it is almost invisible even if there is a use-case.
Surely you can read that and know that it isn't absolute. Yet, I'm the one that can't read? Your reading comprehension is quite low when you're angry over a windowing manager.
>> Look at your unhinged, boorish tone, uncouth bragging about how much money you make, your passionate and irrelevant denunciation of the Linux desktop, the deep personal offense you're taking to other people's UI preferences ... it's sheer projection.
I gave the reason why Linux Desktop support is ill defined. It is the truth and clearly it is upsetting you.
>> Do you have bipolar disorder or something? You really don't seem psychologically healthy.
Yet it is not me that is swearing, showing anger and giving short abrasive responses without explanation? Those who don't have a refutation often try to divert the subject to attacking the claimant and to make it all about them.
Oh dear.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: we've already had to warn you more than once about this kind of thing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30635473 (March 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225935 (Feb 2022)
We ban accounts that can't or won't stop doing this, so it would be good to stop.
Oh the horror!
It’s kind of weird to me that folks think that aesthetics don’t matter for something that’s so central to one’s life.
The legitimate complaint about/problem with aesthetics is when it becomes the priority and/or hampers functionality. The macOS calendar when it took its extremely skeuomorphic turn was the prime example of this (it was such a poster boy for aesthetics over functionality that Apple responded by getting rid of skeuomorphism altogether).
But aesthetic improvements don’t need to be like that at sll.
I was using i3 until the very end though, and I do dearly miss proper window management. My shortcut setup now is an absolute mess. I technically did run i3-gaps because of some features, but not gaps. This was mostly because I actually mostly used a one window per workspace approach, and if more, then a tabbed layout, so no need for gaps there.
I will say though that I run Linux more than ever these days. I'd say the reason has more to do with Windows and macOS feeling like worse prospects than Linux actually improving as a desktop OS...
That said, I'd like to take this moment to tangent. I really, really despise the rise of SOC2 theater. It has largely killed Linux workstations at startups, and I am pretty close to quitting out of the industry due to the amount of stress this has cost me.
That and the "war on hackers" that Apple seem to wage last few years also did not help (breaking uBlock in Safari, inability to permanently disable some system services without having to disable SIP and thus losing ApplePay+disk encryption to name a few)
the same thing goes for desktop windows. a bit of space between them makes the interface less cramped. if you're staring at it for 12 hours a day it's nice not to have things so cramped and pushed up against one another.
I'm kind of amazed at the sheer vehemence of the anti-gaps people. they always have to say "it's useless, I don't know why anyone would want it --" [proceeds to ignore all explanation for why it isn't useless and why people do want it] "-- therefore it shouldn't exist and the people who want it are decadent". I've never seen bizarre attitude to any other (optional!) UI feature.
it reminds me of those 20th century modernists who denounced serifs on letters, or ornament on buildings. or idk puritans or something.
Do you believe there is no merit to being able to set border size for windows?
I don't think it is that unbelievable that I'd like to look at something a little bit nicer than default i3. :shrug:
Unfortunately this state persisted for years, and it turns out gaps is a popular feature, so they both eventually decided to bite the bullet, merge it, and then work on cleaning things up rather than waiting indefinitely for a unicorn implementation that was likely never going to appear.
Eventually, because life circumstances permitted it, I was able to spend a few weeks, first getting gaps merged as-is (as discussed and communicated) and then even cleaned up, addressing all known limitations.
My instincts tell me that if that be the case, the code probably isn't very clean and itself full of hacks.
Very strange, makes me want to avoid i3 altogether. It's not like it requires a lot of code to support configurable, optional gaps.
Probably the rationale is something asinine like "I don't like gaps, gaps are dumb" or "buhu I don't like the completely negligible overhead"
I actively avoid projects whose maintainers are MDFLs rather than BDFLs.
In i3 we have always tried to weigh benefit against cost. We also really care about compatibility. It's easy to add a feature, difficult to maintain it, and impossible to remove it.
Also, saying “it’s not that many lines of code” comparing the before and after state is too simplistic: it doesn’t include the cost of changing the existing code into the desired state, which can be a significant effort, even if the number of lines doesn’t differ much before and after. See https://github.com/i3/i3/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Astapelberg... to get an impression of how much work it was to merge gaps.
I never used i3 much beyond trialing it for embed stuff(went with dwm). I'm too much of a Lisp nerd not to use StumpWM. I like the fact that your stumpwmrc is essentially just a live patch for your WM. You can redefine arbitrary functions, classes, variables, define commands with arbitrary code in them. And you can patch the WM while running via Emacs.
How is i3 support for more obscure unices like OpenBSD, Illumos etc? StumpWM is kind of a pain to get working after they dropped support for all compilers except sbcl...
And I agree completely in about the tradeoffs of adding features.
It's tough to do, though my philosophy in this specific case is also that customization is a core feature of any good tiling WM and should be priorited almost above all, except performance and minimalism.
I briefly (for about a year or so) developed i3 on NetBSD.
I have no knowledge of other more obscure variants, though.
i3 should definitely work on BSD, there are a few awesome folk that regularly send patches when we broke something. I don't have experience with it myself though.
I know I couldn't do it worth a damn, just thinking about it gives me an ulcer.
One other maintainer who I admire is Greg KH, maintainer of the Linux stable branch. 15 years ago I sent him this absolutely useless patch cleaning up the code style of a driver that was marked to be deleted and rewritten from scratch. 15 year old wannabe kernel hacker just finished his first read of K&R and wants to go straight for the damn linux kernel next.
In his reply he not only thanked me for what was basically a waste of his time, explained why there was no point taking the patch, then he went and reviewed the patch anyway! This was at least a couple kloc, and he voluntarily wasted even more of his no doubt precious time to teach me a few more things. He even responded to a follow up email asking for reading material. I'm not sure how he does it. My main hypothesis is Greg KH is secretly the identical triplets Greg, Karl and Harold and they're somehow all kernel maintainers.
That interaction, while just one in hundreds he engages in on any given day, to me was oddly enough life-changing. It let me know I was overreaching to an absurd degree, yet also inspired me to keep learning(big deal for a 15yo). And I did end up becoming a capable low level C programmer, doing some of the best work of my career in embed stuff during the brief windows my health has allowed me to be productive. It also helped me accept that I'm just not cut out for hacking on the kernel, which is fine, almost no one is.
Thank goodness for this. I would say you've succeeded at those goals - sometimes I go deep into tinkering and other times I am focused on something else. i3 is on the short list of software that I can tweak to my liking and then ignore for years without concern that my environment will mysteriously break from an update. I really, really appreciate that, kudos.
To maximise a window temporarily but keep your status bar or avoid your program going into "full screen mode" and hiding UI from you, you have to move it to some empty desktop and just deal with the fact that when you put it back on the original desktop it might not end up where it came from.
Does anyone know why i3 was so opposed to gaps to warrant a fork to begin with?