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TacticalCoder • yesterday at 2:58 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

A pet peeve of mine is that most people / WM get "useless gaps" wrong. You do want a gap between two terminals because otherwise there are times where things can get really confusing (where you don't know what belong to which terminal / window).

So the "borderless" (0 pixels) / zero "useless gaps" simply are confusing and... Wrong.

But then people who do use useless gap, as in TFA, get it wrong too: they typically add gaps near the monitor's edges.

Yeah. But no. Sorry but my monitor's edge is a perfectly fine gap. I don't risk mistaking it for anything.

So I modified my WM (the Awesome WM) to do proper "useless gaps" computation and remove the ones that really are useless: and that'd be those near the monitor's physical border.

I mean: nearly everybody gets it wrong, but it's not complicated to get it right, is it?

P.S: even the terminology is wrong... People calling those "useless gaps" haven't got a clue: they are useful. The only useless ones are the one on the monitor's edge (if your monitor has physical edges, which it probably does).


Replies

joshka • yesterday at 4:52 AM

This was intentional to highlight the borders more obviously.

The test app has a key to turn that off see https://github.com/joshka/ratatui/blob/joshka/cell-borders/C...

The side gaps were for for making it feel balanced in the screenshots and visualizations to be able to show where the borders line up with cells easily etc. It wouldn't be what I'd use in a real app.

One thing to note though is that some things which are "wrong" can be aesthetically pleasing to look at and may be the actual best UX in certain situations. There's a lot of new design principle work (especially in macOS / iOS) that is about things going past the edge, or being overlaid with floating things. Some of this is "wrong" some of it is wrong, and some of it sitting in in the useless gap beteen the two. ;)

db48x • yesterday at 3:21 AM

Man, I’d really like a monitor with no edges. One that just keeps going and going, past my window and the tree outside until it’s completely out of sight. 100% useful area.