What about the gaps makes it more obvious which window is focused? I would have guessed that the gaps are the same for focused and non-focused windows.

If you're looking along a vertical split and you see:

  <window> <active-border-color> <window>

it's not clear whether the border is "pointing" left or right. However if you see:

  <window> <active-border-color> <gap> <inactive-border-color> <window>

It is clear the active border belongs to the left window.

I use plain i3, with a border color for the focused window and a good contrasting indicator color. I always know what window is focused and where the next window will open.

I have always assumed i3-gaps was just an aesthetic thing. How does the gap let you know what window is focused?

Aesthetics matter in all-day ux. Gaps make content more legible and less fatiguing imho. It looks amazing against a #000 background on oled screens, for example.

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!

if the colored gap is left/right of the gap i know the window left/right of the gap is the current one. without gap i would need to look for the other borders to understand which one is focused. i'm sure on a small (<20") screen this problem doesn't exist.

Make the borders thicker?

What's the difference between borders and gaps?

Aesthetics

I call them distractions but this is the beautiful thing about open source. We can have both.

I use a compositor (compton/picon) to dim all windows except the active one.

https://github.com/mikelward/conf/blob/main/config/compton.c...

I do too, but I find it distracting when for example something opens a popup menu and the original window dims/fades away.

Tried also transparency and it really does not work for me either.