#i3

This is my personal fork of i3, which adds some unrelated features to make i3 more enjoyable to use.

##i3bar

This fork performs heavy reforms on the use and display of i3bar.

###Borders

i3bar, by default, has a thin border going around itself. This border makes it difficult to perform certain tricks with color. i3bar normally contains a constant to adjust the size of this border, and therefore allows its removal by setting the constant to zero. This option can only be changed by recompiling (rather than configuration through .config/i3/conf), so here we are.

Rather than continue to inject this constant into every further adjustment, they have all been made assuming a border of zero.

###Width Control

i3bar will normally use only as much space as is needed to display your blocks. Blocks can change the width they consume in two ways: first, they might set min_width, specifying the width below which they should not drop. Equivalently, they might pad themselves with whitespace characters, whose width will be factored into their total width.

Since the whole bar will be filled in, regardless of whether something gets put their, I think i3bar should use the full bar. Width control as described previously was only done by the block. Since blocks don't know the total width they have to fill, they cannot reliably fill it. A new option can then be set by blocks: width. If set to a positive integer, it describes the number of 'M's the block should consume (including separator space). If set to zero, it indicates that the block should have variable width. If more space is available, variable width blocks get more space. Space not taken up by fixed width blocks is divided evenly among variable width blocks.

This new form of width means that the two width setting methods previously described - min_width and full_text - no longer control the width.

###Powerline Divisions

Powerline is a vim plugin that alters the vim statusline to be more powerful and pretty. It achieves prettiness through use of color, and by dividing everything with arrows. I thought powerline looked nice, so I decided to copy it's look in i3bar. In order to do so, one new option can be set by blocks, and a bunch of other options are ignored. That option is 'above'. If a block is 'above' the next block, it will be render with an arrow pointing into that block (unless no_separator is set). Otherwise, the next block will have an arrow pointing into the it (even if no separator is set). A block 'above' another will be drawn after the lower one, and so has a higher z-index than the lower one.

The ignored options are those pertaining to separators, besides no_separator. Specifically, separator, separator_block_width, and perhaps others.

###Fill

A great deal many things a person might want to display on an i3bar are percentages. E.g. volume, battery use, wifi strength. Fill describes a system to make a better display for these percentages. Blocks can send the fill option as a number between 1 and 100, describing the percentage thereof. Alternatively, any full_text containing a number directly before a percent sign will be parsed as a fill percentage. Blocks should also send a color in the 'fill_color' option. If both fill and fill_color are set, then fill_color will be used like a second background, filling a percentage of the width pertaining to the percentage specified.

###Use

No doubt many i3bar children easily support adding the necessary options to take advantage many of these features. i3blocks allows the addition of options by changing one line in a header file. However, more complex modifications are required to fully realize the potential of width control. The modifications remove support for automatic setting of width based on the width of text. The thinking is that this is better controlled by the child process, since most blocks will want a certain amount of padding, and there is no system to inform i3bar of your desired padding. The old i3bar supported padding control though whitespace on the full_text. However, this requires configuration of your child process to do anyways, so I thought you might as well modify your child to set the width explicitly.

i3status makes it quite difficult to add new properties, requiring them to be individually configured for each block type. Moreover, in it's default state, it doesn't support the current full wealth of i3bars options (eg background). Furthermore, i3status is complex enough that adding the width modifications described above would be quite a chore. I would advise not mixing i3status and this version of i3bar.

###Example

i3bar is fully dependant on it's child process. Following is an image of an example configuration. This configuration would be described in detail at syrrim/i3blocks.

##Vertical Tabs

Vertical tabs are presented in a separate column to the left of the window. At first glance thye may seem lesser to horizontal tabs and to stacking mode: they are much thinner (can't display long titles), and by default they waste the majority of the column. The advantage is that they maintain their dimensions even when you've created a large number of them. If you open 10 tabs in stacking mode this will take up a quarter of your screen. If you open 10 tabs horizontally, they will each be much thinner than the tabs in vtabbed.

###Use

To enable, first add a similar line to this in your config:

bindsym $mod+t layout vtabbed

And you will be able to enable vtabbed the same as any other layout.

###Close Order

I find it most useful to have an adjacent tab be selected when the focused tab closes. This makes the next selection more predictable, and makes it easier to close several tabs in a row.

##Upstream

This is a fork of i3/i3. The majority of the source code comes from there. Patches pertaining to the features described above, or which analysis of the commit history has otherwise lain at my feet, might be submitted here. Otherwise, they should probably be brought to the attention of mainline i3.