I made outlines for KDE Breeze window decoration
akselmo.dev
akselmo.dev
I actually wrote a Windows app to do something like this. It's sitting in my unfinished folder because I ran into too many issues to fix for a hobby project. The rectangle data for Windows apps seems to vary widely. I needed a bunch of different formulas to correct for the rectangles I was getting back from the WinAPI calls.
One of my features was a different border color for each app. I tried various color rules, such as multiple copies of VSCode would each get their own shade of blue, or cycle through colors of the rainbow.
In KDE I can precisely control and set window border thickness and colour.
In Microsoft Windows 10 (and I assume 11 has continued the trend at making this even worse) I can enable a very thin border, of a themed colour, and that border disappears when the window is no longer in focus. This means a couple of terminal windows (eg gitbash) have near impossible to discern edges when they're overlapping.
On top of this, some Microsoft applications seem to break their own styling rules (Office apps, say) which I suspect is the kind of issue that stalled your project.
Reminded me of those Windows 98 shell customizations. Windows seems to be going backwards when it comes to customizations; there are only a few customizations allowed in Windows 11 now.
What I do not comprehend is the logic behind why Windows does not support such in my view easy to implement choices.
Obviously with a busier amount of text on fore / rear terminals, and more than just two terminals -- that lack of a clear border becomes a massive confusion.
If you've found a better configuration, please do share.
I have excellent vision and constantly struggle to figure out where GUI elements begin and end.
Like... Windows 95 has distinguishable UI elements figured out. They had clear borders, and it was easy to figure out if something was a button or input field, if it was enabled or disabled, buttons had icons and text, the use of depth was great too.
When and how did it go so wrong? It's not like there's a sudden shortage of screen space. That was a GUI that worked on a 640x480 monitor.
Looking at the screenshots I have a question for the KDE users here. I am surprised by the incorrect kerning and strange padding on display in the interface. Is that normal or is it a consequence of it being so customisable the author likes settings which leads to this result?
Eventually you get used to it, and start ignoring it. Sadly. I'd switched to Gnome for many years, but in the end - being able to easy tweak the desktop to my liking drove me back to KDE.
Looks like equal distance but there is more blurring between e and w so they can appear closer.
For the padding, you can see that the spacing is strange under and over the toolbar icons. There is a lot of space between the icon in the title bar and the icon in the toolbar. Alignement between icons and texts in the file browser sidebar seems suspect to me too especially for "Pictures".
I know some people don’t care about that kind of things but I find it unsettling. Looking at it I know I wouldn’t be able to use KDE.
And of course, it's also possible that using a better font would improve things.
https://i.imgur.com/zCDzqAe.png (2× resolution screenshot as it's from a high-DPI screen)
This is a play on how shadows work on real life; where objects may have a strong shadow from an overhead lamp, and a softer shadow via lighting bleeding in from windows or other rooms.
The results of this are very subtle -- an untrained eye sees just "a shadow" and not two (I can only recognise this because a designer friend taught me this trick).
I wonder if applying a similar technique on window borders could work. But instead of the inner shadow being less intense, it would be a higher contrast one. It's definitely worth exploring.
Personally, I'm prefer simple borders instead of shadows. They take up just 1 or 2px (e.g.: maximise space efficiency), and are super clear.
> Something cheeky happens! I actually draw the shadows with 0% alpha channel!
Does that still pay the performance cost to "draw" them, or does it get optimized away?
How does one use it?
Is it a script I can put somewhere on my laptop and then the borders will have outlines?
I use Debian Stable.
I think Plasma has something like "Decorations" - can a custom decoration be used? Can one use scripts in the "Decorations"?
emerald, compiz: fairly famous window managers/compositors everyone used to use, e.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QokOwvPxrE
> how is this related to window borders
compiz is famous for including all sorts of fancy/over the top effects like windows going up in flames, so stuff like glowing window borders should be no problem at all.
By now compiz seems mostly unused, but many effects are also available in kwin. For instance
system settings -> desktop behavior -> desktop effects -> dim inactive
Kinda the opposite of outlines, where it just dims everything else instead of highlighting one, but maybe it works for you?
Also it makes it hard to work with multiple windows, because some of them are dimmed then.
That kinda is the whole point of static releases like debian stable, ubuntu lts, red hat or windows ltsc? That you actively don't want to have any changes like these but want stable (=static) foundations to build on. (currently writing this on old stable; don't feel bothered to upgrade right now)
> I think Plasma has something like "Decorations" - can a custom decoration be used? Can one use scripts in the "Decorations"?
The software under discussion seems to be a change to the breeze window decoration so for this one probably not (yet), but e.g. for aurorae
Also, your post is incredibly rude!
I know plastik feels so old and out of date. But it feels more tactile to me because of the higher gradients.
Then KDE4 got lost in an ugly, buggy mess of transparency.
KDE 5 went the other way and Breeze looks great. I sometimes try other theme but always come back to Breeze. I even used Breeze on GNOME and found it better-looking than Adwaita.
The DE is a personal preference thing. It's nobody's job to convince you to try anything.
It's up to you to decide to try it if you're curious.
Since you haven't tried KDE in 15 years, you've probably missed a lot.
There are also countless KDE Reviews online and on YouTube.
KDE has been a joy and is now my DE of choice.
These days I prefer KDE, and I accept quirky behavior like losing a widget panel from external monitor 1 if you unplug external monitor 2, because I know it will come back after reboot/relogin. In exchange for that, I get different wallpapers for each monitor, custom/extra panels, several alternatives for application menus and taskbars, lots of widgets, and a few small QOL perks I can't remember right now.
If KDE becomes too quirky, I can always go back to Gnome, but right now I'm happy with KDE.
Sure, if you always want each application to be full-screen. Otherwise you can't get anything done.
Gnome these days is the my-way-or-the-highway kind of uncle.
They're actively hostile to user theming, for example, and keep removing features simply because they don't think users need them, like desktop icons.
Their file browser is horrible to use. Their image viewer is anaemic.
They keep finding new ways to dumb their applications down, to make things less "confusing" for the users, I suppose.
They adopted MacOS-style headerbars, but ignored Apple's solution to the lack of functionality that brings ~ their Menu Bar.
From an user point of view, I often try to not change too much default settings, but there are some really nice feature I enjoy. kde connect is particularly nice for the media player integration with my phone). Yakuake is a nice dropdown terminal. The wayland port is really smooth, there is a lot of features everywhere and I often make use of a big percentage.
Oblivious if you are fine with GNOME, this is also fine. We have some different vision on how a open source desktop should look and behave but we do share a dream to someday be a good replacement for Windows for a large part of the population (not nerds).
The overwhelming majority of the people I know who use KDE also try to not change too much from the default settings, but the settings we change are all different.
It's similar with the bells and whistles in Plasma; I probably use a single-digit percentage of them, but they are probably different set from what other users use. I am grateful for those who maintain these features, because I'm sure both that developing would be easier with fewer features and there is probably nobody who uses all of them.
For example, I hate having to jump through hoops to disable tabs in Firefox. Which means using a janky extensions that usually is able to split the tab into a new window. Doesn't always work. I also have to go and manually tweak the browser chrome to hide the tab bar.
The way I see it, tabs and whatnot are a window manager's job. I don't want to have several levels of window management, each being handled differently by a separate app.
If you want to provide tabs, go ahead, but please don't force them on me and let me disable them. I'm OK with having to modify some obscure config file if you insist on removing preferences from your UI. Heck, if I could compile firefox with a special feature flag, that would still be better than the current situation.
Also, FWIW, the latest win 11 22h2 update brought tabs to the windows explorer.
But I'm a tab user, and would like to hear about other approaches.
Yes, when there are many tabs open, at some point, I can't distinguish them easily anymore, especially on the laptop. But the same happens with tabs. At least I can scroll my mouse wheel to change between them, which didn't use to work with tabs.
My coping mechanism is saving the tabs I want to keep for later as bookmarks. Getting back to them has the same kind of probability as when I used to use tabs. But the win of this approach is that I don't have open webpages hanging around eating resources.
I've also found that there are basically two ways I use my computer:
1. I'm just randomly browsing, and I am going to open a zillion tabs (say while browsing HN) but then I'll read them and close them sequentially. No jumping from one to another, so the tabs being small is not an issue.
2. Having several windows open that I all need while working. In this case, I'll set them up in some tiling setup, usually an editor / terminal where I work on one side of the screen, and multiple browser windows in tabbed mode on the other. I then jump back and forth between the two sides. If I need to access a specific browser window that's not visible and there are too many open to know where to click (which does happen, but rarely) I'll just use the jump to window function of rofi in fzf mode where I type in a part of its name and press enter. This isn't perfect, but it works well enough for me. Since i3 doesn't have an included "go back to previous window", I had to hack this on my own [0]. This could also be implemented by using window marks, though I've never tried that.
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[0] https://github.com/vladvasiliu/i3helper
Other alternatives exist, but I thought it was fun to build my own.
Ah right, I remember reading that and noting that they always seem to playing catch up with KDE Plasma’s features. I doubt I have this update yes, but someday my work’s IT will thrust it upon us.
I was just very curious and was hoping that someone like yourself responded to my question. You have peeked my interest and I will try and play with KDE in the near future. Thanks!
This is one of the thing that (surprisingly, to me) I miss on other operating systems. Yakuake manages to be featureful, stay out of my way, and integrate perfectly with the default terminal emulator for my environment all at the same time.
I'd come to take the availability of such a dropdown terminal for granted on Linux, but it turns out that most dropdown terminal solutions are quite clunky, slow, or not well integrated compared to good ol' Yakuake.
If there are any Yakuake or Konsole contributors browsing the thread: thank you for your work!
But this week I decided to try out the latest KDE plasma release on Debian testing and it's all going quite well so far. I love having the ability to configure things how _I_ want them to be, while adhering to a more traditional desktop experience.
The easiest way to try out the latest KDE release is to download Neon (https://neon.kde.org), flash it to a thumb drive, and boot it up.
More info:
https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbna...
THANK YOU!
Over the past few years, UI design has been trending towards removing ALL visual cues of how to interact with software and programs. It's intensely weird that we are actually making computers HARDER to use, not easier. Need some examples? Okay!
* Menus containing frequently-used program functions are hidden away behind abstract, arbitrary icons. * There is no separation between parts of a UI that do different things. It's all "flat." * Buttons that perform actions are just text now, and usually look like all other text on the screen. * Icons are now all monochrome, except for branding purposes. * Scrollbars, when they even still exist, are thin lines that only appear while you scroll, making them effectively useless for grabbing with the mouse to quickly navigate through a document. * On Windows and GNOME, titlebars are effectively no longer a thing anymore. Each program implements their own, leading to an inconsistent look and behavior between applications. The only explanation that I can come up with is that most developers these days either use tiling window managers or just fullscreen every application.
Lack of window borders is another item on this list. My monitor is quite often filled with overlapping windows and lack of border means it's often hard to tell at a glance where one window ends and the other begins. Shadows can help sometimes but aren't as useful for "dark mode" or windows with dark backgrounds.
KDE is better than most other desktop environments about retaining useful desktop functionality while all the others are trying their damndest to throw it all away. I hope this makes it into a release!
https://www.akselmo.dev/2022/10/31/assets/images/kde/outline...