i like i3, but its maintainers are drama queens that baselessly rejected a patch of mine, and even banned me, all due to some irc drama. if you want to read more about this drama, checkout the appendix section.

anyway, i'll keep my patches here. for me to use, and others who like it. all while maintaining the taste of liberty, the taste of gplv3!

patches (so far just one)

1. i3 surface focusing mode

synopsis— this patch, in the file i3-surface-focus-mode.patch, is a simple solution to solve i3's vertical and horizontal focusing swamps problem. tested and works great with x11-wm/i3-4.18.2, and it keeps working perfectly with later releases of i3. currently i am using x11-wm/i3-4.19.1 with no problem at all. i have setup my gentoo to apply this patch automatically every time i3 gets updated, and i forgot about it thanks to it working perfectly every time.

usage

bindsym KEYS focus DIRECTION surface

where:

• KEYS is any upstream key binding as per i3's bindsym syntax.
• DIRECTION is any upstream direction.

i3 has swamps?

without this patch, i3 has a major usability problem, by which moving around with the focus command will also shuffle your tabs or stacks. for example, stacks are vertical, and when you want to move the focus upwards and fall in a stack, you will get stuck there (i call it a vertical swamp), and keep moving up/down in the vertical direction really slowly as you shuffle the stacks.

i3's official solution to this annoying vertical swamp problem is to put i3 is to do mod+a for selection all elements in the stack swamp, so that you jump there. but this approach is not o(1) as it requires the user to be aware of swamps ahead of him as he navigates across tabs. realistically, we often discover that we are stuck in a vertical swamp only after we've fell into it and wasted a few mod+direction key hits already, only then we put i3 in manual 4l gear (i.e. mod+a) then do another mod+direction to finally get out the swamp!

a similar problem happens with tabs, except that tabs are horizontal swamps. this is an identical problem to the horizontal swamps above, except for having a vertical polarity.

therefore, a neat solution is to introduce the surface focusing mode (which this patch does). this way, we can navigate around with focus direction surface as we want, without causing any stacks or tabs to re-shuffle. this way, you won't need to keep scouting ahead of your steps to watch out for vertical/horizontal swamps, nor need to put i3 in manual 4l gear (mod+a)!

finally, in order to shuffle the stacks or tabs, you can simply use the sibling focusing mode (which is already in upstream).

a neat side effect of this is that stacks and tabs can now be treated just like tabs, except that stacks are tabs that are visually looking different than tabs.

example config

here is how my i3 uses the focus mode. of course you can use other bindings, this is just how i like to use it:

bindsym $mod+h focus left surface
bindsym $mod+j focus down surface
bindsym $mod+k focus up surface
bindsym $mod+l focus right surface
bindsym $mod+Mod1+h focus left
bindsym $mod+Mod1+j focus down
bindsym $mod+Mod1+k focus up
bindsym $mod+Mod1+l focus right
bindsym $mod+p focus prev sibling
bindsym $mod+n focus next sibling

As you see above, I personally like it this way:

• mod+DIRECTION to be in focus mode, so that i move around freely without any fear of any swamps as i gloriously hover over them like magic!
• mod+p and mod+n to shuffle previous/next in sibling mode (already in upstream i3).
• mod+Mod1+DIRECTION to move around in manual L4 gear, for surgical situations, which also shuffles stacks/tabs (which is the default option in upstream i3 yuck!).

appendix

i3 drama synopsis— a blind person that lurks in dark the corners of the freenode irc network, whom goes by the nick squigz, confused me against another person that apparently wasn't pleasant to squigz. so, this squigz started banning me in channels where he is an op, spread railing accusations about me with other ops of other channels. squigz even kept pushing ops of #weechat-offtopic to ban me (they refused since i didn't do anything wrong, of course squigz quit the channel, at least momentarily, since he is apparently a drama queen). but the drama queens of i3 (aka i3's maintainers) fell for it and went full twilight-mode. more info is below.

• historical description about the stack/tab swamp problem: i3/i3#3738
• historical reference about the original PR in i3 (and the drama queen i3 maintainers): i3/i3#3859
• an i3 maintainer actually liked this focus idea a lot (in his own words), and also approved the simplicity of the patch. could've easily ended up in upstream i3 to the benefit of humanity. but they rejected it simply because of the psycho squigz and the drama queen i3 maintainers who can't act professional for 1 second. i mean, look at how an i3 maintainer is talking? can't stand straight either.