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HowTo: Add more focused window border contrast

Ken Gilmer edited this page Dec 28, 2019 · 3 revisions

The default Regolith style may not provide enough contrast for some to differentiate between the focused window and others in the active workspace. There are two primary ways of adding more visual hints as to the focused window: opacity and borders. This howto will cover the latter.

  1. Stage the i3 config and Regolith Xresource styles in user directory.
  2. Edit your ~/.config/regolith/i3/config file and add the line default_border pixel 2 to cause i3 to create window borders of 2 pixes. See the i3 user guide for more details.
  3. Stage a copy of /etc/regolith/styles/i3-wm in your user directory. Be sure this file is referenced from your copy of ~/.Xresources-regolith instead of the default version in /etc/regolith/styles/i3-wm.
  4. Edit the i3-wm style file you just created and update the line i3-wm.client.focused.color.child_border: to specify a color, for example i3-wm.client.focused.color.child_border: color_blue.
  5. Log out and back in to have the Regolith session load from your user-staged files.