A tool for decorating i3 (should work with Sway too!) windows when they get focused, written in Rust.

When using i3-gaps I ran into the following problems.

• Glitches when using regular borders and titlebars that showed up in the background (as described here), which as far as I know haven't been solved yet.
• The above meant usually relying on transparency or dimming to have a 'highlighted' state, which for me at least beats the purpose of having all your windows in a tiled fashion. To get the highlighted effect you have to lower the opacity or dim it to the point it's too hard to read.
• Even if borders and titlebars did work properly. They just don't gel very well with the a e s t h e t i c anyway.

Eventually I gave up and continued using vanilla i3 instead, but had this idea floating around. It focuses on those shortcomings. Does it solve them? Not too sure myself, but it was a fun experiment.

• Rust v1.5x, currently only tested with v1.53.0
• A compositor, since it literally draws windows on top of your windows.
• GTK needs to be on your system to build this application, follow the instructions here

Since the binaries are not distributed yet, and this hasn't been published as a crate either, the only way is to clone the repo and then run with

cargo build && cargo run

By default this application should use the style.css in the root of the repo, but you can provide your own using the --styles arg and providing a path to your own styles.

The css file dictates how the window decorations look like, and they have 2 elements to customize, #box which represents the boundaries of the window and #label, which has the window title. Additionally, there's an .animate class applied to the parent which can help triggering animations for both the box and label.

A simple example for this, animated using transitions:

#box {
  background: rgba(255, 200, 0, 0.2);
  transition: background 2s ease, margin 0.2s ease;
  margin: 10px;
}

.animate #box {
  background: transparent;
  margin: 0px;
}

#label {
  opacity: 0; /* Hide the label */
}

This will produce the following