To make powerline actually look like powerline: good_i3blocks_powerline.png
Instead of this: (not mine) bad_i3blocks_powerline.png
If you could not see, the entire bar has a 3px margin on top and bottom, which is very not cool.
You'll obviously need pango formatting for this to work. In your i3blocks.conf change/add these lines at the top of the file:
markup=pango
full_text="<span font-family='Source Code Pro' size='16000'> </span>"
separator=false
separator_block_width=0Then add [separator] in every place that you want to show a separator.
Change the font-family too:
If you're using a patched font for the entire bar i think it'll work if you set the same font for this.
If the font isn't patched you'll have to find a patched font with the same size as the one in your i3bar config. For bitmap fonts there's Tamzen and Terminus, and for vector fonts there's a zillion Nerd Fonts
It's also possible to patch the font by yourself but it's hardd
Eye candy
To make eye candy, you can just copy the full_text variable into any [separator] and change the things you want like fgcolor or bgcolor. See Pango Markup manual
[separator]
full_text="<span font-family='Terminus' bgcolor='#0000FF' fgcolor='#00FF00' size='16000'></span>"Lastly to remove the 1px margin add this: (put in the top to apply globally)
background="#FF0000"
border="#0000FF"
border_top=30
border_bottom=30
border_right=0
border_left=0
Credits to u/riiskyy for enlightening me on the global setting