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Comment by europeanguy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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