flashfocus

Simple focus animations for tiling window managers.

Compatible with sway as well as all X based window managers (i3, bspwm, awesome-wm, xmonad...).

Flashfocus is currently pretty stable and I don't have any major features in the works, however the project is still actively maintained and feature requests are always welcome :)

Installation

For X based window managers, an active window compositor is required for the effects of flashfocus to be noticeable. If you don't have one setup already, I recommend picom.

Arch

Install from the Arch User Repository: flashfocus

Ubuntu/Debian

sudo apt-get install libxcb-render0-dev libffi-dev python-dev python-cffi
pip install flashfocus

Fedora

dnf install libffi-devel python-devel python-cffi
pip install flashfocus

openSUSE

Flashfocus is in the official repository of openSUSE Tumbleweed. openSUSE Leap users can install it from the X11:Utilities devel project:

zypper ar obs://X11:Utilities x11util
zypper ref
zypper in flashfocus

Nix / NixOS

Declaratively in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
  flashfocus
];

Ad hoc

nix-env -iA nixpkgs.flashfocus

Quickstart

Picom setup

The following must be present in your picom config file:

detect-client-opacity = true;

If you use i3, the following is also required for flashfocus to work with tabbed containers:

opacity-rule = [
  "0:_NET_WM_STATE@:32a *= '_NET_WM_STATE_HIDDEN'"
];

Running flashfocus

Flashfocus should be added to your startup programs. E.g for i3 place the following in your config:

exec_always --no-startup-id flashfocus

The flash_window script can be used to flash the current window on key-press. E.g if you'd like to bind to mod+n in i3:

bindsym $mod+n exec --no-startup-id flash_window

Configuration

Flashfocus can be configured via its config file or with command line parameters. Some features, such as window-specific flash customization, are only available through the config file.

The config file is searched for in the following locations:

1. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/flashfocus/flashfocus.yml
2. ~/.config/flashfocus/flashfocus.yml
3. ~/.flashfocus.yml

When flashfocus is first run it creates a default config file in 1. or 2. Documentation of all configuration options is present in the config file.

See the wiki for some extra docs.