cassidyjames
commented
5 years ago With client-side decorations, a window manager's job is less to show which windows have focus, since it does not decorate the windows. It's up to the toolkit (GTK) and stylesheet (and to a lesser extent, the app by not overriding important focus styles) to track and display focus.
I agree your first example is hard to tell which is focused; I'd chalk that up to the custom styling in both of those apps.
In the VSCode example, the only part that's drawn by the OS is the titlebar itself, and the left one is a lot higher contrast than the right (dimmed) one, which means the left side has focus. I'm not sure if there's anything internally VSCode could also do to with its own internal UI to also better distinguish focus.
For the Files example, that seems super clear to me; one window has normal contrast, depth, and saturation. The other is flatter, less saturated, and lower contrast showing it's not the focus.
I would say this is a stylesheet concern more than anything, and as such I've moved it to that repo. But I'm not sure practically how we'd solve it if apps themselves override styles or don't do anything internally to denote focus.
megatux
danirabbit
One of the main functions of the WM is to make it easy for the user to show which window has focus, but I find very difficult coming from other WMs to know at a glance what window I'm working with.
Not sure if this is a Gala, or a Gtk style thing, or both. Let me add some examples:
Two windows with different border colors:
Which one has the focus? I usually use keyboard shortcuts but I mistakenly trigger it in the wrong app/window.
Two windows of VSCode (50%/50% positioned), a normal layout for working with projects:
Two windows of Files app (50%/50% positioned):
Do I have something broken? (Some time ago I tweaked the GTK settings.ini file but I cleaned it) or is this the default style? I find it oddly broken .