FEATURE REQUEST: Dim Inactive Windows

[necopinus]

Consider this a humble request that you might find useful/interesting, and would have the upside of considerably increasing the usability of tiling window managers when used with it...

Would it be possible to implement a feature to dim inactive windows, similar to what Kwin allows? This would probably work almost identically to the current "-i" flag, except that rather than making inactive windows transparent it would darken (and possibly desaturate) them by the given amount. Possibly other useful flags: prevent panels from never being dimmed, dim all windows except foreground (i.e., make dialogs pop, probably should "double-dim" inactive windows).

I've been looking for a feature like this to use in conjunction with Xmonad for a long time, and compton looks to be the closes to something that can actually implement it.

Thanks for the consideration!

[chjj]

Sounds like a challenge. I've been tinkering with it a bit. I sort of have it working, I just need to fix it up a bit.

[david]

@Ecopunk, xmonad already supports this (at least partially) with any composite manager. See FadeInactive extension in contrib: http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Hooks-FadeInactive.html