One of the interface changes in Tiki 25 was putting giving button classes to each of the anchor elements that contain a side column toggle icon. This was done to make the interface elements more consistent in appearance. Specifically, on wiki pages, the wikiaction dropdown icon (a vertical ellipsis icon) has a .btn-info class, and the page's edit, history, rename, etc. buttons also have Bootstrap button classes.
Also, especially on large screens, the isolated side column toggle icons, being just an icon without a surrounding button background, etc., can be quite small. So for these reasons the button classes were added. However, there was some feedback that now they look too chunky and intrusive. This discussion is the reason for this page, which will show some different arrangements of the side column toggle buttons to compare and maybe get a consensus on future versions.
All of these examples are from fairly fresh Tiki installations, master or branch 25, and no page-top margin has been added via the CSS variable.
Current situation (Tiki 25.0)
The buttons in this version are in the locations they've been in for many (all?) Tiki versions: above the side columns and near the page's side margins (or content container's side margins in the case of a fixed-with layout).
Buttons moved to top of main content column (#col1)
The idea here is to emulate the position and behavior of buttons controlling the visibility of aside elements, such as shown on https://bootsnipp.com/snippets/Q0dAX. In this case, the buttons are alongside the side columns, not above it, and move as the side column moves, or appear to as the side column displays or has a display:none property.
In terms of code modification, this is quite a simple change.
For comparison, icons without button container
This shows the buttons in the same position as in the previous example but this time the button classes have been removed so just the "bare" icon displays.
New try: chevron icon and btn-secondary
Part of the problem with the legacy appearance of the toggle icon (a left- or right-pointing triangle inside surrounded by a border) is, IMO , the border kind of makes the icon look like a button, but it's a different sort of button than the others that Tiki uses, which are implementations of Bootstrap buttons. So this new try uses a simpler icon design — the chevron — that doesn't have a border. Instead it uses the Bootstrap button border. The btn-secondary class, or whatever is most discrete, could be used.
The buttons can be moved slightly closer to the side columns. In this test, spacing wasn't optimized to do that, yet.
Further evolution: Inline with page-top content
The space at the top of the page is very valuable so losing a whole row of space just because the row has the small icons at the beginning and end seems rather wasteful. The idea for improvement here was to move the content such as the pagetop module zone and the wikiactions and translation dropdown icons up between the two side column toggle icons.
Having the icons in a row together also makes for a more coherent display of the page controls so in terms of user experience it makes sense as well as being nicer visually .
Also, the side column toggle icons shown in the image above have negative margins of 13px that position them closer to their respective columns and a bit farther from the center column content, to increase the sense of connection with the side columns. It might be possible to position them even closer to the side columns or even in contact with them but, because the module zones, modules, and buttons are rendered differently in each theme, it seemed better to keep a bit of distance between the button and the side column.