I submitted a patch to add i3-gaps a couple days ago: https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=38721
After it got merged into master with the inheritance modification (see patch), I installed it over the one I had installed from my original script and it seemed to work fine. But I think that's just because I didn't reboot to restart the i3 executable. Now that I shutdown and opened my machine again, i3-gaps specific commands don't work... To test this, write `i3-msg gaps` in a shell. If it does NOT work, it will output something like: brown@121407 ~$ i3-msg gaps ERROR: Your command: gaps ERROR: ^^^^ ERROR: Expected one of these tokens: <a long list of stuff that represent valid commands> However, it seems that gaps work if I remove the package, install it from the original package definition (without Brett's (inherit i3-wm)) and reboot. The following output means that i3-gaps has been correctly installed: brown@121407 ~$ i3-msg gaps ERROR: Your command: gaps ERROR: ERROR: Expected one of these tokens: 'inner', 'outer', 'horizontal', 'vertical', 'top', 'right', 'bottom', 'left' This is strange. I still don't know enough about the packaging API to troubleshoot this all just by having a quick look at i3-gaps' definition. I'll try to investigate this issue but I encourage someone more knowledgeable than me too look into this too.