The i3-gaps project has been merged with i3 | Hacker News Reader

The i3-gaps project has been merged with i3

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454 pointsharporoeder173 comments

Hi. I'm the maintainer of i3-gaps and also a maintainer for i3.

The story of this merge is not only several years long, but a true success story in OSS in my eyes.

I took on i3-gaps by taking an existing patch and rebasing it to the latest i3 HEAD. From there it became popular and I took on the maintainership, eventually contributing to i3 itself and finally becoming a maintainer there as well.

Whilst originally gaps were considered an "anti feature" for i3, years ago we already decided that we'd accept adding gaps into i3. Clearly the fork was popular, and as someone else pointed out here as well, the Wayland "port" of i3, sway, added gaps from the beginning on with great success.

However, the original gaps patch was focused on being small and easy to maintain. It caused a few issues and had some drawbacks. We made it a condition that porting gaps into i3 would have to resolve these issues. Alas, this could've meant a lot of work that no one took on for the years to follow.

Recently, however, the maintainers of i3 got together (a chance to meet arose randomly). During that meeting we decided that it'd be better to just merge the fork and improve it later. And as it happened, Michael, the author and main maintainer of i3, did all that work during the port as well.

What resulted is the end of almost a decade of i3-gaps, and a much better implementation thereof. I'm incredibly happy to see this happen after all this time, and a big shoutout to Michael here for all that work.

Edit: Hadn't realized Michael was commenting here already. I guess leaving the background and story from my side of things doesn't hurt regardless.

Thanks to both of you for maintaining i3(-gaps) all these years! I don't remember exactly when I started using i3 but it's been at least 9 or 10 years, if not more. I didn't make the jump to i3-gaps until a couple years later but, boy, am I glad I did!

For me, i3 is one of those few pieces of software that is pretty much optimal – it is rock solid and stable, I wouldn't know how to improve it any further and I also couldn't imagine living without it. By now, my i3 keybindings are hard-wired into my brain and I despise having to work with any other window manager or desktop environment! Besides, for the few rare cases where you do forget to lock your screen, a tiling wm with custom key bindings is a great way to prevent your colleagues from messing with your machine, in particular: announcing free cake using your Slack account. :-)

Story time:

When I was still doing research in cosmology back in 2014/2015, one day there was this new guy in our research group and, as it so happens, we ended up sharing an office. A couple weeks in, we were both at our desks and he looked over my shoulder and said:

"Ahh, I see you're using i3!"

"Yup, been using it for quite a while and I absolutely love it!"

"Do you know who the maintainer is?", he replied, with a big smile on his face.

Turns out, Michael was his brother! So that's how I learned to remember the name "Stapelberg". :-)

[@secure: Please say Hi to him for me!]

A few years after that episode, one night I told a good friend of mine about i3 & i3-gaps and we both had a look at their Github repositories. My friend had recently started working at this IT consulting firm, and he went: "Wait a second, Airblader / Ingo Bürk? That's my colleague!"

Not long after that discovery, I started working for a startup in Munich and it just so happened that the startup had also hired that same consulting firm for their dev team. Aaaand Ingo was their consultant! I'm honored to say I learned a ton from Ingo during that time and I still look back fondly to pair-programming with him (i.e. mostly him telling me what to do or patiently explaining things to me). If I've ever seen one of those infamous unicorn rockstar 10x developers, it's definitely him!

Four years later, I ended up at that consulting firm, too, in no small part thanks to Ingo convincing me to join them.

All this is to say: The world is small. And: You guys have changed my life! Thank you! :)

It truly is a small world! I’ll say hi to him, thanks for sharing :D

> For me, i3 is one of those few pieces of software that is pretty much optimal – it is rock solid and stable, I wouldn't know how to improve it any further and I also couldn't imagine living without it

I like i3 in principle, but the lack of vertical dock support is a dealbreaker for me. Things like swaybar taking up vertical space across the entirety of my wide desktop is just a shame.

There’s a GitHub issue for this vertical bars. It sounds complicated.

https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/1129

Upvoted - dont know why people would downvote a simple opinion (which includes a fact) stated without any apparent malice.

You can always use an alternative dock. I prefer using i3-gaps with Polybar simply for aesthetic and customization reasons.

Not supporting vertical dock clients is indeed a limitation in i3, using another dock client doesn't help here.

The pleasure has been all mine. :-)

Thanks for providing the background here, and thanks for maintaining i3-gaps over all the years! :)

I’m also happy we could complete this merge now!

Thank you both for creating and maintaining the snazziest and most reliable window manager in this galaxy.

Ah i3. With the sole exception of vi, no other software is so fully embedded in my muscle memory. Thank you, I think.

> Ah i3. With the sole exception of vi, no other software is so fully embedded in my muscle memory.

Ironic, given that the default i3 configuration uses jkl; instead of hjkl for direction.

Oh that's a good point. I forgot about that. I aligned them immediately and then forgot that my values aren't the defaults.

> Recently, however, the maintainers of i3 got together (a chance to meet arose randomly). During that meeting we decided that it'd be better to just merge the fork and improve it later.

Off topic:

Sounds like an in-person meeting, as opposed to only being remote, facilitated a roadmap change that hadn’t happened without it.

I think the in-person meeting made this a bit easier, but we had been talking about it prior to that, so I think it would've happened either way.

Thanks to you and all the other i3 maintainers. i3 is a life changing experience for me. It completely changed the way I looked at computers themselves (having been raised on a steady diet of Windows and OSX, i3 was the first time I became aware of the fact that there could be other desktop UI paradigms, which changed how I look at nearly everything else as well).

On a more practical level, I’ve never been more efficient as I have been i3.

So a deep thank you to all the folks responsible for building such great software and making it accessible to so many so easily.

What do you think about getting alt-tab support in there? Here to say this: https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/i...

You want to use i3 to collapse focus management into a single temporal dimension?

I'll die defending your right to do so, but dear god your taste is atrocious. It's like you finally got out of prison and decided to decorate your bedroom window with iron bars.

In every window manager that supports it, alt tab does two things.

Alt tab with a long hold on alt lets you select another window, albeit from a linear list as you describe, by cycling through with tab and shift-tab.

Quickly typing alt-tab now cycles between the window you came from and the window you just selected. That’s the super useful value of the feature.

Is there an i3 command to (a) leap to another window from a selection and (b) leap back and forth between the window you came from and the window you just chose?

> Is there an i3 command to (a) leap to another window from a selection and (b) leap back and forth between the window you came from and the window you just chose?

Not for windows as far as I know, but for workspaces, yes: https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#back_and_forth https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#workspace_auto_back_and...

For (a) I've been using rofi. I bound a key to open its window switcher which gives me a searchable list of all open windows. There are quite a few other options: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/I3#Jump_to_open_window

For (b) I don't know what the best option is but I see some people posting their scripts in this thread: https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/838 I think I would bind some keys to mark and then focus by mark if I wanted to do this instead of having a toggle.

So far as I know, the only way to get that functionality is to put the windows next to each other and to navigate them spatially (or to write a script that does it and bind that script to alt+tab).

But grouping windows logically based on how they're used has always just felt right, so I've never really considered that you want to keep track of the order in which windows were previously selected (using alt-tab to navigate even just three or four windows can be quite a trick). It always seemed like a necessary evil since floating-only window managers can't handle the kind of spatial focus-navigation that i3 does.

Do you happen to know an alt tab that just uses the currently visible desktops ? ( I have two monitors, and want to alt-tab between windows without finding the old ones hidden)

---

Also, I feel bad using this thread for feature requests/questions. Lovely work guys, and I am very grateful!

Do you mean currently visible desktops or windows? https://github.com/sagb/alttab is the utility of my choice to get what I wanted.

Much much much thanks to you all for working and contributing to i3. It is the primary reason I use Linux. I love it. I couldn’t do my work without it. Thank you!

Cool to hear some background stories to i3 from you and the other replies here. I didn't think about it in some time since i3 just works, but yeah thanks for maintaining this great project. Also surprised Michael is still maintaining/using it after becoming a Go evangelist. ;;-)

Thanks for all the work maintaining and improving i3 I enjoy using it every day and really appreciate it.

Being a user of i3-gaps for a couple of years. Just want to say thank you for all the work!

Thank you and the team for all the hard work! i3/gaps has always been my favorite twm.

Adding to that, I didn't fully move to wayland until sway was mature enough for my day to day work. i3 (I think I found the project through a twit from somebody at Google) is completely burned into my mind and my current workflow and I just could not living without it.

Thank you! I use and love i3 gaps and can’t wait to update to i3 mainline in the future.

I never thought I would live to see this day! Thank you so much for the work

thank you so much for all your hard work!

Thank you.

i3-gaps is included in i3 v4.22, which is available in many Linux distributions already.

You can find the release notes at https://i3wm.org/downloads/RELEASE-NOTES-4.22.txt

Documentation for the gaps feature is at https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#gaps

Maybe 15 years ago or so, I wrote the original “useless gaps” patch for dwm, because it felt packed, especially between different window styles (terminal, web browser, file manager for instance). The concept was new to tiling managers but quite common anywhere in photography, typography or web design.

At the time, I spent a minute or two on the patch (the code is simple, and the patch is a hack), ten minutes on documentation Ascii art and zero minute on choosing a name for it. “Useless” made it sound like a casus forki, and “gap” could probably been just “margin” as in css.

“Mal nommer un objet, c’est ajouter aux malheurs du monde” — Albert Camus ~”misnaming an object is adding to the world misery”

Happy merging anyway!

Just now saw this comment. That's really neat, pleasure to "meet" you. :-) That naming certainly gave me some headache over the years because it always stuck, and seems to be the cause of all the heated discussions. Anyway, I also wouldn't have it any other way now!

I just realized I've been using this magnificent piece of software for 7 years.

Stealing some tray icons (volume, clipboard, KTeaTime, network), I built the setup I'll probably use for another 7!

Thanks to everyone involved! Tiling WMs rule!

I just wish that i3 came with a gnome-like settings app for casual desktop users!

Definitely check out Regolith Linux. It’s a DE built on top of i3 and solves all the complaints I had. It’s been my daily driver for about a year now.

Settings panel? Check. Keyboard media keys? Check. Automatic display when plugging in monitors? Check.

https://regolith-desktop.com/

>Definitely check out Regolith Linux.

I was a BIG fan of Regolith, super sensible defaults and smooth onboarding experience. But with the V2 it seems the config is now split in 100's of files (ok not 100 but more than one). I loved the fact that with original i3(Regolith) I had to back up 1 file for my i3. I now moved to Manjaro-i3. Been happy so far.

The key (on Ubuntu at least) is to simply go with the standard Ubuntu installation and then switch to a custom .xinitrc-based X session that starts i3. That way, you can still fire up the usual Gnome dialogs (e.g. for printers) when you need to. (Obviously, some settings related to configuring your desktop – e.g. key bindings – will no longer work.)

Or use Regolith Linux. They've done a fantastic job integrating i3 with Ubuntu, including settings, etc

in case this thread becomes informational for interested folks:

fedora lists a page of images with alternative desktop environments baked in and i3 is one

https://spins.fedoraproject.org/en/

Fully agree!

I have mint, using the xfce-based version. I can open xfce-panel whenever I dont know what to call on the cli (and then promply close it :P)

You can actually use a desktop with i3 as the window manager and use the existing settings menu if you prefer. Not every desktop supports this but for example kde does.

I recently installed arch and when you select i3 it makes you choose between i3-wm and i3-gaps. This led me down a bit of a rabbit hole, but in the end I was happy to find I didn't have to choose between forks after all!

What a great project. For those who are wanting something similar for macOS, the Amethyst project is pretty great https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst (meant to be more like Xmonad actually but still a tiling wm).

Has the performance improved over the past few years? Last I tried it (2017 or so?) It was so much slower than i3 that I couldn't stand it and went with hand-rolling something with hammerspoon.

[Edit for context] I used Linux at home but was forced into a MacBook at work.

Can’t say for certain, but I think the speed has improved over the past several years. Definitely more stable (for me anyways). I haven’t used i3 so I can’t compare the two.

Out of curiosity, is your hammerspoon substitute fit for showing off ? I'm a tiling window manager refugee and I love hammerspoon but every time I try to dive into making something like my old xmonad setup, I run into macos-specific issues about the concept of apps and windows and workspaces and such and them not mapping to my prejudiced mental model of how things should be.

I didn't do a whole lot of tiling with it, mostly just added keyboard shortcuts to open or bring to the front specific applications as (at the time) I was on a Mac without an external monitor. I found I could switch between windows quickly enough that I never needed multiple visible on the screen at the same time.

https://www.hammerspoon.org/docs/hs.application.html#launchO... was the primary method, though sometimes (such as teams) I had to get more creative.

That said, I believe https://github.com/szymonkaliski/hhtwm is quite popular, might be worth a shot if you want tiling.

And for us bspwm/sxhkd folk, theres yabai[1] and shkd[2]

[1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

[2] https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd

If i3 is still in an upstreaming mood I'd love to donate my web based theme/config generator: https://thomashunter.name/i3-configurator/

Both i3 and i3-gaps introduced me to TWMs and I remain grateful for the role they played in my productivity.

Thanks, team. Congratulations on the merge. Take care.

I guess it's been 12 years on i3, time flies :)

Thanks to the maintainers -- a stripped down Linux distro + i3 is an incredibly powerful combination.

Yep, I'm also grateful to have discovered i3, only several years ago for me. Thanks to its low memory usage it's helped me save a decent amount of money as I'm able to easily develop on a Linux VM running on an 8GB M1 and don't need to upgrade to 16GB.

I went back and forth on gaps.

I like the idea of maximising screen space utility (original reason for gaps feature rejection), but disliked the visual "feel" of i3wm window borders. Eventually I realised this was due to the visual asymmetry in the tile borders, which are drawn independently even though they share geometric edges - this causes inner edges to be twice the width of outer edges which looks kind of clunky. If you look at most people's gaps setup, most people either equalize the space between the outer and inner edges, or have gaps so large that it doesn't feel like it's part of the tiles any more.

I also noticed that you don't get this feeling in tmux, where outer edges just don't exist... And that you can achieve the same in i3 by hiding outer edges and using 1 pixel borders, you end up with minimal 2 pixel "dividers" rather than borders:

  new_window                  pixel 1
  new_float                   pixel 1
  hide_edge_borders           both

Will be nice to have gaps available to play with in binary packages though.

About time!

Does anyone know why i3 was so opposed to gaps to warrant a fork to begin with?

Both the author of i3 and the author of i3-gaps (who is also a maintainer of i3) originally opposed merging the i3-gaps code because the code was a bit hacky and had certain edge cases where it would break things (e.g. you couldn't enable both gaps and titlebars simultaneously). This was done deliberately so that the two codebases could be easily kept in sync. They weren't necessarily opposed to introducing a gaps-like feature if an implementation was deemed acceptable.

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.

That’s right. We waited for a volunteer to help with the merge (as we both didn’t have enough time to spend on working on gaps), but nobody ever showed up.

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.

So there's no further cleanup needed? Or are you still looking, just in a different repo?

No further cleanup needed

Cynically speaking I'm somewhat scared of the way i3 is programmed that adding gaps would have to be hacky.

My instincts tell me that if that be the case, the code probably isn't very clean and itself full of hacks.

Why is gaps something that matters is what I would ask first. Seems to me increased complexity for no benefit.

With a good background contrast, it's easier to have windows stand out from each other. The default config with 0 gap and thin borders make it very hard to see which window is focused.

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.

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.

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.

The benefit is that it looks cool and a lot of people seem to like it.

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.

People want the thing they’re staring at all day to look pleasing to the eye.

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.

/r/unixporn is where i3-gaps was born, as a matter of fact.

There's a small footnote to this, but I think it's true enough to say it like that.

Curious to hear the full story!

The footnote is that I didn't author the idea of gaps in i3. There used to be a loose patch floating around that applied to an old version of i3.

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.

There's actually a hardcore sister reddit of r/unixporn, https://www.reddit.com/r/unixSOCKS

Back when I used i3-gaps myself (yes, that time is behind me, sorry), I liked the visual clarity gaps provide. And from years of interacting with the community I know many people feel the same way. It just makes things feel less cluttered.

Out of sheer curiosity, what kind of setup do you use today? I did briefly try i3-gaps myself but ultimately never daily drove it. (nowadays I run Sway, but with no gaps.)

This will make some people sad, but I'm on Mac these days.

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.

Honestly I ran Mac for 3 years or so and i3 was one of the reasons I went back to the Linux.

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)

I'm not sad per-se. I mean I have a strong distaste for modern macOS, but it's not like it matters to me personally what anyone else runs. I'd just prefer to not run it myself.

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.

Exactly. There's a reason whitespace is a thing in graphical design.

I like having a small gap. It pleases me to use a Desktop environment that looks like it at least belongs in this decade.

Edit: I realise some people are okay with the brutalist design due to it being the most efficient use of screen space possible, but my brain needs a "pleasing" environment, otherwise it affects my... Mood? I'm not quite sure what it is, but to not muddle the point, having a nice environment makes me more productive

I have no idea what this means. What WM adds completely useless gaps between windows?

Both Windows and MacOs do not such thing. How do gaps make a WM look like it belongs to this decade?

I’m not sure how we determine what looks like it belongs to this decade, but surely these legacy desktop environments don’t push the envelope or tell us much, really.

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?

If there are people who like gaps, it's not useless. It has value for them.

I'm not a designer, so I can't really tell you why the little bit of extra negative space helps. Maybe just the fact that a little bit of the background can bleed through makes it seem more modern, and its easier to distinguish focused windows. Default i3 just gives me like... 90iea vibes, but not in a nostalgic way but a regressive way. Maybe it's just a matter of different tastes.

Windows XP has round borders, there is no way it can tile without gaps.

why do books and websites have margins between the text and the edge of the page? because a judicious amount of blank space between elements just looks nice and makes it easier to read. typographers and graphic designers think very hard about this stuff, it isn't useless.

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 and icon-smashers or something. miserable tube-brained people.

well, dwm includes them[0] as a patch so i’m guessing even the most hardcore of folks occasionally want them.

these days with high resolution monitors it can be nice to have a background and some gaps / transparency.

[0] https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/gaps/

At work I have a 43" "cheap" monitor that is more of a TV than a monitor. Meaning, at the very edges the backlight isn't behind the pixels at a desk viewing distance. i3+gaps allowed me to put a gap around the left, right, and bottom few pixels, so my text right at the edge wasn't unreadable.

I wonder why you phrased your thoughts this way. The benefits are the additional options which were implemented in the fork. If there were no benefits then 1. no one would use this, which clearly isn't the case and 2. this merge wouldn't have occurred

Other than aesthetics, In a standard window manager titlebars and task bars often pad the top and bottom of the screen, I run without either so having borders still feels more natural in some respects.

IT makes windows stand out more from each other. They are in effect very thick borders that stand out.

Do you believe there is no merit to being able to set border size for windows?

I look at that thing most of the day.

I don't think it is that unbelievable that I'd like to look at something a little bit nicer than default i3. :shrug:

Remember old fashioned paper newspapers? Now imagine reading one that didn't have margins between blocks of paragraphs.

OSS in a nutshell

Indeed, some folks found the feature unnecessary at first, but somebody found an OK way to implement it, and eventually it became popular enough that they decided to merge it back into mainline. Little drama and everyone is happy in the end. Actually I think this is more like the OSS ideal.

EDIT: Comments from the maintainers have painted a completely different picture while I wrote this so none of this applies here but I'm leaving it up as a general view on maintainership.

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.

I see your point (in general terms). But I think people tend to overlook the hidden costs of optional features in terms of maintenance and complexity (in code, documentation, and for users).

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.

Yup! We even have an FAQ entry on the reasons for not merging features without careful consideration: https://faq.i3wm.org/question/778/why-is-patch-not-merged-an...

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'm impressed with your complete lack of snark in response to my asininely snarky comment, edit or no. I went from thinking you're a bad maintainer to thinking you're one of the more level headed ones I've interacted with. I feel like there's some kind of lesson here about Bayes' Law.

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 general 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 can promise you that in a decade of doing this, I've made my fair share of mistakes as a maintainer. There's a learning curve to everything, and maintainer burnout is a real thing, too.

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.

Naturally, the best maintainers are those that are humble enough to learn from their mistakes. And maintainership is just hard, way harder than writing code IMO. You have to have and defend a vision for the project, and yet not be so staunch as to scare off the many users and contributors you depend on. You can't be everybody's best friend; sometimes you really do have to give a list of 18 different bugs in a 10 LOC PR, and yet somehow try to do it without completely disheartening someone who means well and wants to learn. And then on top of all that diplomacy you still have to dig down and figure everything out when a particularly nasty regression slips through the cracks.

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.

OpenBSD packages i3: https://openports.se/x11/i3

I briefly (for about a year or so) developed i3 on NetBSD.

I have no knowledge of other more obscure variants, though.

> In i3 we have always tried to weigh benefit against cost. We also really care about compatibility.

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.

The beauty of free software is that nobody will coerce you to use it, and nobody cares if you use it.

I'm incredibly thankful to the maintainers for doing the thankless job of keeping i3 stable and for doing it so well.

The discussion[1] over "maximise" leaned towards "that's dumb, only dumb people want that" for a very long time, and it's still the one thing in i3 I find jarring.

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.

[1]: https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/2107

I think that's an unfair and fundamentally false representation of the discussion on that issue. But I won't further comment on it here.

I actively avoid programmers that use "MDFLs" and "BDFLs" in their sentences...

I think it is generally best to not assume people have asinine motivations.

I've been a long time i3wm user, and I couldn't be happier with my workflow. What network managers are people using together with i3? I've been using wicd for a while, however with Debian deprecating Python2 this won't be viable for long. I haven't found another lightweight GUI network manager which works well with i3. This might not be the perfect place to ask, however I don't use Reddit.

Network manager, with nmtui and nm-applet.

Same here. NM worked flawlessly on my Sway setup, which is not i3, but Sway is very similar to i3 anyways.

nm-applet also, works fine

I use iwd and systemd-networkd. I don't use may applet or gui control. With my setup I just and up ignoring network configuration the majority of the time.

Edit: I've found iwd such a huge improvement over past wireless networking solutions. It's a big improvement.

Maybe iwctl would work for you?

Network-manager is the easiest transition

Happy i3 + Plasma user here, great combo. Thanks for all your efforts!

+1 for plasma, it has excellent support for swapping out the window manager

I tried installing Plasma and it crashed my machine. Had to go back to gnome. What distro are you using?

Arch with i3 instead of Kwin.

11 uninterrupted years. Once I discovered tiling window managers, I never looked back and never switched from i3wm.

Thank you.

Thank you for your work on i3-gaps, Airblader.

I've been using it for years now. Started with plain i3 but quickly wanted something a bit more elegant and nicer to look at. I had 2 hi-res monitors so I was willing to sacrifice few pixels for an eye-candy. I spend most of my day looking at the thing after all :-)

Honestly it baffled me for a long time that i3 did not have such a "simple" thing as gaps. I could understand the anti-pattern theory in the good ol' era of 1024x768 but nowdays?

Anyway it is good to hear that it is merged. Thank you and Michael for the i3 experience, it is truly addictive. I was on MacOS for ~3 years and I missed it every single day there.

Installed i3 8 years ago. Still can't use anything else. I enjoy it so much.

Thank you guys

i3 is my daily driver. Thanks i3 devs for what you do!

> All i3-gaps features will become available with i3 4.22 (not released yet at the time of writing this).

When was the time this was written? I don't see a published date on the announcement.

As I understand, v4.22 is released now and available in some distros already :)

if i3 just had persistent workspaces I would love to give it a good try, but they seem astonishingly resistant to the feature. xmonad has its own issues but at least it has all the features I need.

Assign workspace to specific screen->assign specific window/program to workspace and area within the workspace ->set i3 to open whatever programs/windows you want on start up and they're automatically arranged. That's more or less my set up and it's pretty persistent as far as I can tell?

What do you mean with persistent workspaces?

hm, probably not the right term for it, but the workspace display in the pager does not show empty workspaces. so if I have windows open in workspaces 1, 3 and 7 e.g. they would be indistinguishable from windows open in workspaces 1, 2 and 3. xmonad does this right, it has all available workspaces displayed in the pager at all times.

There's an open PR that will make this possible.

that's awesome! do you reckon the pr is going to get accepted? I definitely remember reading discussions of this issue in the past and seeing a firm "we don't want this feature in i3" response.

The PR is coming from one of the core maintainers, so yes, it will be accepted.

It doesn't just implement this specific feature, though. It provides a more general approach for i3bar that enables this and many other use cases. This struck us as a good and flexible solution we can get behind.

Thank you i3(-gaps) devs for your work on this productivity booster!

Whew! I've always spent too much time deciding which way to go.

sway has had gaps built in for a long time :) I don't use them though, why waste screen space?

If I have a 27 or 34-inch monitor, I can spare 4-5 pixels for elegance.

I have a 27" monitor, and I use a 3px border for the active window border, so I suppose I'm wasting some space.

I have two 27" 4k monitors and don't want to waste a single pixel. I did not looked how the gap feature can be enabled/disabled and I really hope the default is disable contrary to the new "drag window" feature that can not be disabled and that regularly disrupt my workflow.

(I know that an upgrade add the ability to disable the drag window feature, it's just not available in FreeBSD yet).

i3 user here with 42" monitor: I still wouldn't waste the space for gaps/elegance/eyecandy.

But, as with anything, this is a matter of personal taste.

As someone focused on productivity, gaps help me make sense the current state of the desktop, by separating better the contents of multiple windows in the same workspace.

For single window workspaces you just don't apply the gap (smart gaps).

I use gaps in XMonad and I find they help to make screen borders (or shading in case I use a compositor) more visible to quickly move my eye to the active window.

Very useful for techy video calls - folks you're presenting your screen to, should be able to determine which borderless terminal window ends where.

Depends on the screen size and resolution but for the 1080p 14" laptop I'm finding these settings sufficient to do the job and not take much space:

    gaps inner 8
    gaps outer 3

I find that using gaps (not big ones, 5-10 pixels at most) helps me differentiate between similar windows (like terminals) much easier. And, also, I just looks more elegant imho.

You could also use a 3x5 pixel font. Why waste screen space?

way ahead of you dawg: https://dotsies.org/

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