A Few Suggestions for The i3-wm

Question

I've been a user of i3 wm some time. Now that am new at using (only) a wm for my everyday work, I can say that am quite satisfied the way it significantly speeds up switching between different windows and workspaces. i3 has been so far quite nice with its well writ documentations (albeit a few glitches here and there).
From my experience using it, there are some recommendations to be considered for change/add in future releases of i3. I'll list them below one by one.
1. As the documentation at i3's home site describes, i3 mentains the list of windows as a tree, hence the windows obviously have a parent-child relation. And the implementation happends to be that when a parent window is terminated, the child window is also terminated. This is at most cases undesireable. For e.g. suppose you open a pdf document from your terminal and put the process to background like $ evince file.pdf & and then you close the terminal window. You'd of course like the window in which evince is running to remain open, wont you? But as per i3's default behaviour the evince window'd also be closed. Of course you can use a menu program (like dmenu) to launch such a program, but AFAI think most wm only people 'd prefer using the terminal to launch stuff. These sort of wm s are probably called non-reparenting wms. I'd like to see i3 as a reparenting one. After all, that seems logical to a wm only environment..isnt it?
2. When i3 is restarted for some reason, the processes that are start up with i3 (i'm reffering to only those added in the i3 config file, not .xinitrc) are not restarted, but rather another instance of that process is run. For e.g. suppose conky is piped to dzen or something else to be displayed in i3bar. The first time you start up i3 after boot up, they are naturally started as child processes to i3. When you restart i3, those two processes aren't killed, instead new instances of conky and dzen 'd be run ; even the bash shell created to run the command isnt terminated(obviously) . You can use pstree -p to display current process trees and restart i3 to check this. This seems to be the case even if you exit i3. Does it feel natural?
3. This one's more of a feature request(if its already not available, aint sure). Is it possible to define a different backgrounds for a perticular app? Like, I'd like to have all my focused terminal windows with a yellowish background for the border. and a blueish bg for all other apps (by bg I mean the colour of the..what should I call it.. title bars(?)'s background colour)
I tried putting this in my i3 config:
for_window [class="(G|g)nome-terminal"] client.focused #ECC806 #00B0B9 #ffffff
and then defining common colour codes separetely for all other windows. But seemed not to work. Is it actually possible?
It 'd be nice to have that in i3.
One more question. Can I encapsulate the rules for a specific 'for_window' section with braces?
Well that was it. Corrent me if am wrong anywhere. And tell me what you think on no. 1 and 2.
Of course it all upto the devs, untill am apt enough with C to adapt the source code to my liking.  Lets see.

Answer 1

debdj wrote:2. When i3 is restarted for some reason, the processes that are start up with i3 (i'm reffering to only those added in the i3 config file, not .xinitrc) are not restarted, but rather another instance of that process is run. For e.g. suppose conky is piped to dzen or something else to be displayed in i3bar. The first time you start up i3 after boot up, they are naturally started as child processes to i3. When you restart i3, those two processes aren't killed, instead new instances of conky and dzen 'd be run ; even the bash shell created to run the command isnt terminated(obviously) . You can use pstree -p to display current process trees and restart i3 to check this. This seems to be the case even if you exit i3. Does it feel natural?
Yup. More precisely, I have this piece of code in my config:
bar {
status_command /home/archman/.i3/myi3status.sh
font -*-terminus-medium-r-normal-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
After restarting i3 inplace, old myi3status.sh is left alive, while another one is being started, which makes piping information to fail.
myi3config:
#!/bin/bash
i3status -c /home/archman/.i3/i3status.conf | while :
do
read line
echo "Gm `cat /home/archman/.i3/gmailstatus` | $line `setxkbmap -query | awk '/layout/ { print $2 }'`"
done
Now when I think of it, I could include 'pkill myi3status.sh' in it to make the job, haha!