Borders don't work in Dashboard

[mirunic15]

I have been putting together my own rice and I wanted to incorporate a dashboard into it. I had never programmed in lua before and I wasn't too familiar with all of the functions of the awesome libraries so I used elenapan's dashboard configuration as a base. The thing is that my theme has borders on almost all windows and wibar components and I was looking to add borders to the dashboard widget boxes as well, but they do not show up. I used the border_width and border_color properties of wibox.container.background(), which I have used for all of my other borders, but again they simply do not show up. I also tried adding them to some widgets inside the box containers, such as around the profile picture, and I have the same issue. I have no idea why this happens.

Here is my code for the create_boxed_widget() function, all I have added are lines 62 and 63, and a screenshot of how my dashboard looks with the respective code.

57 local function create_boxed_widget(widget_to_be_boxed, width, height, bg_color)
58     local box_container = wibox.container.background()
59     box_container.bg = bg_color
60     box_container.forced_height = height
61     box_container.forced_width = width  
62     box_container.border_width = beautiful.border_width
63     box_container.border_color = beautiful.border_color
64     box_container.shape = helpers.rrect(box_radius)
65     -- box_container.shape = helpers.prrect(20, true, true, true, true)
66     -- box_container.shape = helpers.prrect(30, true, true, false, true)
67     
68     local boxed_widget = wibox.widget {
69         -- Add margins
70         {
71             -- Add background color
72             {
73                 -- Center widget_to_be_boxed horizontally
74                 nil, 
75                 {   
76                     -- Center widget_to_be_boxed vertically
77                     nil, 
78                     -- The actual widget goes here
79                     widget_to_be_boxed,
80                     layout = wibox.layout.align.vertical,
81                     expand = "none" 
82                 },
83                 layout = wibox.layout.align.horizontal,
84                 expand = "none" 
85             },
86             widget = box_container,
87         },
88         margins = box_gap,
89         color = "#FF000000",
90         widget = wibox.container.margin
91     }
92      
93     return boxed_widget
94 end

(ignore the uneven spacing and margins on the weather and uptime widgets, im still working on those)

This is my entire code btw, it is still a mess, but just in case it clarifies anything. config.txt

[mirunic15]

Update: I made a very shitty workaround to this, by adding essentially another background container on top of the existing one, but making it smaller, like this:

 58 local function create_boxed_widget(widget_to_be_boxed, width, height, bg_color, border_color)
 59     local box_container = wibox.container.background()
 60     box_container.bg = border_color
 61     box_container.forced_height = height
 62     box_container.forced_width = width
 63     box_container.border_width = beautiful.border_width
 64     box_container.border_color = beautiful.border_color
 65     box_container.shape = helpers.rrect(box_radius)
 66     -- box_container.shape = helpers.prrect(20, true, true, true, true)
 67     -- box_container.shape = helpers.prrect(30, true, true, false, true)
 68
 69     local boxed_widget = wibox.widget {
 70         -- Add margins
 71         {
 72             -- Add background color
 73             {
 74                 {
 75                     {
 76                         -- Center widget_to_be_boxed horizontally
 77                         nil,
 78                         {
 79                             -- Center widget_to_be_boxed vertically
 80                             nil,
 81                             -- The actual widget goes here
 82                             widget_to_be_boxed,
 83                             layout = wibox.layout.align.vertical,
 84                             expand = "none"
 85                         },
 86                         layout = wibox.layout.align.horizontal,
 87                         expand = "none"
 88                     },
 89                     widget = wibox.container.background,
 90                     bg = bg_color,
 91                     shape = helpers.rrect(box_radius-border_width),
 92                     forced_height = height-border_width,
 93                     fored_width = width-border_width,
 94                 },
 95                 margins = border_width,
 96                 widget = wibox.container.margin
 97             },
 98             widget = box_container,
 99         },
100         margins = box_gap,
101         color = "#FF000000",
102         widget = wibox.container.margin
103     }
104
105     return boxed_widget
106 end

I did this for every container where i wanted borders, and, well, it works.

[mirunic15]

If anyone has any better solutions or any idea why wibox.container.background borders don't work with the dashboard, meaning a screen mask and a wibox, I would appreciate it if you could share :))

[elenapan]

Hi there,

I believe the problem is that beautiful.border_width is set to 0 in the theme you are using. For example, it works for me when I hardcode the width and color inside create_boxed_widget():

diff --git a/config/awesome/elemental/dashboard/amarena.lua b/config/awesome/elemental/dashboard/amarena.lua
index ff761c7..11c3b5a 100644
--- a/config/awesome/elemental/dashboard/amarena.lua
+++ b/config/awesome/elemental/dashboard/amarena.lua
@@ -55,6 +55,8 @@ local function create_boxed_widget(widget_to_be_boxed, width, height, bg_color)
     box_container.forced_height = height
     box_container.forced_width = width
     box_container.shape = helpers.rrect(box_radius)
+    box_container.border_width = 10
+    box_container.border_color = "#FF0000"
     -- box_container.shape = helpers.prrect(20, true, true, true, true)
     -- box_container.shape = helpers.prrect(30, true, true, false, true)

[mirunic15]

Hello, I am using a theme which has borders, they are visible on all of my client windows and the beautiful.border_width does work on any other container. I have re-checked and I do have the setting in theme.lua and I believe I have imported it correctly since other properties work. I had also, and have now re-tried hardcoding the values and they still do not show up.