Shell: "Show active hint" almost entirely disappears when the gap is set to "0".

[maria-komarova]

During the usability testing three users have pointed out that setting the gap to 0 would almost entirely hide it from view. Those users preferred to have as much screen space as possible without any gaps.

One of the possible solutions is to disable the hint when someone sets the gap to "0". But that might result in the confusion and frustration if a user toggled the hint on before setting the gaps to "0". We should probably avoid a user thinking it is some sort of bug.

I think it might also be a question of adjusting the hint overall. Some participants in the testing and, to be honest, me too, found the hint to bee too distracting. It might be the question of color but it might also be the question of the thickness of the hint. I will look into it and see if I can come up with any other ideas.

[jmmaranan]

@maria-komarova:

• would it be possible to consider 0-sized gap or maximized or smart-gapped to have a very thin border that is positioned slightly inside the window? This works for folks who had each a maxed window on two monitors. The active-hint will go back to normal position when going out from any of these mentioned _max_ states. Here is a proof of concept for maximized (need more coding on 0-sized gap but they can basically be treated the same):
  
• Full screened windows, would be no active-hint.

[maria-komarova]

Yes, thin border inside looks fine to me. That might be a way to go. What is the size of the active hint here?

[jmmaranan]

@maria-komarova, the thin border is at 2px. And what are your thoughts on the current thickness of the active hint? It is currently set at 5px.

[maria-komarova]

5px seems a little too thick to me. Ideally, it would be nice to have it consistently at the same thickness. But I wonder if 2px would always be noticeable, especially if we add grey as an option for the Active hint color, as was suggested in #462.
I'll try to experiment this week and see how that might work with other colors. When I tried it before grey was not noticeable enough. Maybe this is just the matter of the offered color choices.

[jmmaranan]

Sounds good. I think offering custom border thickness would work too. 2px up to 5px would be nice I guess. 5px, maybe even 6px considering higher dpi or larger resolutions?

[mmstick]

Visually the border should look the same on LoDPI and HiDPI if we're scaling the px by the scaling factor.

[jmmaranan]

You might be correct. I think the styling interface is already handling the DPI? I guess that was a bad example to relate thickness. I was just trying to say some users might go for thicker borders, e.g. accessibility, or just preference.

[WatchMkr]

When originally working on the active hint, I found 3px struck the right balance between visually identifying active windows and gap spacing. 5px seems to drowned out the gaps between windows.

I like the idea of positioning the hint slightly inside 0 gap, maximized, and smart gapped windows. I'm concerned it could interfere with chrome-less windows like Alacritty. If we can pull it off without interfering, it would provide better consistency and the option to use 0 gaps and active hint together.