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Comment by input_sh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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