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Comment by porphyra

2 days ago

> windows should be square

found the Windows 8 enthusiast! haha, I kid. (I myself use a tiling window manager , i3, with completely square windows without any gaps or rounding)

Haha, Windows had square windows long before 8.

If I could run the Windows 2000 UI on a modern OS I would but any recent clone/theme/etc feels too uncanny valley.

My custom XFWM theme has square corners on windows without focus and large-radius rounded corners on the one window with focus.

The square corners are part of a 2 pixel wide border (one black, one white) because who needs to waste space on handling things we aren't manipulating? But the title bar is high-contrast, because you'll go looking for it when you want to switch windows.

The round corners go with a fairly thick border in a customizable color, usually something very bright in the yellow, orange or cyan ranges. When you sit down, you should immediately know what is active.

Not having i3 is truly the worst part about Macs.

(Yes, please tell me about some buggy half-compatible tiling window manager for my Mac.)

  • For real. Doesn't help that the three/four finger swipe between full screen windows/workspaces has a mandatory animation that you can't disable (you can turn on "reduce motion", but it simply changes the scrolling animation into an equally time-wasting fading animation).

I like rounding the corners on i3. It is a bit wasteful but the base WM is so efficient with my pixels that I have some to spare.