Use better colour for window title during visual_window_select

[ed9w2in6]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Currently the window titles is rendered with highlight bg / default bg colours, and for some reason the foreground colour is always black. This is indicated with the red dotted square rectangles in the provided photo.

This is particularly problematic for dark theme. Light theme are less impacted.

Describe the solution you'd like

I believe there are better choices:

1. maybe using the XX_tab_fg/bg colours in a config to render it instead. (circled green)
2. use reverse video

I don't really have a preference as long as it is not done how its done right now.

Documentation should also be updated to inform the users that those colours will affect this function too.

Describe alternatives you've considered

1. Use a light theme
2. set a contrastive highlight fg / bg defensively
3. Ignore it.

Additional context
FYR:

(The character rendering problem in the picture is unrelated to this issue.)

Maybe these lines?

kitty/kitty/shaders.c

Lines 781 to 785 in 45f4b8e

	snprintf(titlebuf, arraysz(titlebuf), " %s", PyUnicode_AsUTF8(title));
	#define RGBCOL(which, fallback) ( 0xff000000 | colorprofile_to_color_with_fallback(screen->color_profile, screen->color_profile->overridden.which, screen->color_profile->configured.which, screen->color_profile->overridden.fallback, screen->color_profile->configured.fallback))
	if (!draw_window_title(os_window, titlebuf, RGBCOL(highlight_fg, default_fg), RGBCOL(highlight_bg, default_bg), bar->buf, bar_width, bar_height)) return 0;
	#undef RGBCOL
	Py_CLEAR(bar->last_drawn_title_object_id);

[kovidgoyal]

No, the title is rendered using highlight_fg on top of highlight_bg. Make sure your theme is using contrasting colors for those. You can see this for yourself in line 783 of your snippet. These are the same colors as are used for selections.

[ed9w2in6]

@kovidgoyal Maybe this is a macOS issue then? I am sorry but please do not close this issue yet, I do still observe the issue:

Here is a minimal reproducable environment:

include_white_dot_conf.conf

include white.conf
visual_window_select_characters 12345
map super+o focus_visible_window
font_size 22

white.conf

foreground #ffffff
background #ffffff
selection_foreground #ffffff
selection_background #ffffff

Place both in the same directory then launching kitty with kitty -c include_white_dot_conf.conf yield this:

As one can see the window title text is still black despite both default and highlight fg bg set to white.
Again, this means bad news for dark themes.

[ed9w2in6]

Then the reason I suggest using reverse video can be a good idea is because this will then be consistent with the documentation which suggest setting both to none will use a reverse video effect.

The other solution (XX_tab_fg/bg colours) is perhaps an inconsistent behaviour but I think it could look good. I am fine with not making this change though.

[ed9w2in6]

I have tried installing via homebrew, which uses the binary releases from this repo, then also tried directly downloading from this repo.

Compiling from source has also been tried using nix, which still exhibit the same behaviour.

I am using this version for all the provided screenshots.
kitty --version:

kitty 0.41.1 created by Kovid Goyal

[kovidgoyal]

On Sun, Apr 27, 2025 at 06:18:12AM -0700, ed9w2in6 wrote: ed9w2in6 left a comment (kovidgoyal/kitty#8579) @kovidgoyal Maybe this is a macOS issue then? I am sorry but please do not close this issue yet, I do still observe the issue:

Maybe, I will test on my mac machine when I have a moment. Dont worry about the closed status of issues, it doesnt mean anything other than that I dont yet have a way to understand or reproduce the issue. Incidentally, a simpler way to test it is: kitty -o selection_foreground=white -o selection_background=white --config=none -o 'map f1 focus_visible_window' --session <(echo "launch\nlaunch\nlaunch")