Homebrew-emacs-plus: Adding white title bar option for ns build

[idoo]

Hello, that patch https://github.com/d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus/pull/21 is awesome, but it would be nice to have back compatibility with light schemes (it has white text title when window is active, and it's not really readably)

Do you have any ideas how to fix it?

[jwintz]

Yeah, @d12frosted reporter this, I'll dig up on that one.

[d12frosted]

@jwintz would be nice to have a solution for this 😸

[jwintz]

Ok, I have looked a bit, here's what I came up with:

    // win.titlebarAppearsTransparent = true;
    // win.appearance = [NSAppearance appearanceNamed:NSAppearanceNameVibrantDark];
    // win.titleVisibility = NSWindowTitleHidden;

• titlebarAppearsTransparent is the feature
• NSAppearanceNameVibrantLight is the default, gives a dark title label colour
• NSAppearanceNameVibrantDark is an alternative, gives a light title label colour
• NSWindowTitleHidden does not display the title label at all.

I would go for the latest option to update my patch, since the application name and the current buffer's name is redundant information.

What do you guys think ?

[idoo]

I think that current buffer's name sometimes can be useful. Can you show examples how it will works?

[jwintz]

You mean an example with no title bar label and a light theme ?

PS: Current buffer is easily visible by looking at modelines :-)

[jwintz]

Ok, spacemacs-light theme, and no title label.

[d12frosted]

@jwintz ah, so the colours are 'hardcoded'. Personally, I don't look at the buffer name in the title bar. So I don't care about it. But some people might care about it.

I wonder if it's possible to expose variable in emacs that will control the appearance name. That would be ideal, so people could control it however they want. Even those who use dark/light theme switch based on a sunrise/dawn.

[jwintz]

Still reading Cocoa's documentation to find a better solution.

Clearly I'm not in favour of exposing the title bar's label to emacs config, unless this is honoured by a maximum of theme maintainers, which is most likely not gonna happen.

I have two options:

• inferring the background color of the theme, inverse it and set the label's color up (should there be an API for it)
• implement a subclass of NSAppearence, but it will lead to a huge and difficult to maintain patch

Will let you know.

[CarlQLange]

Just dropping in to say that some elements of this patch may no longer be necessary with --HEAD since this commit: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/commit/7baa50eca28ff21497b058fa22656bbb4a447d87#diff-f43249227e5879c3fc3d7c08b1c41b1c

[CarlQLange]

just dropping in again to confirm that I didn't need this patch when installing from HEAD, I just set ns-transparent-titlebar.

Changing ns-appearance between dark and nil seems to change the window title font colour from white to black, so that's cool and potentially useful here.

[jwintz]

Awesome.

[d12frosted]

@CarlQLange that's totally great to hear! thanks for the headsup!

[CarlQLange]

👍 No problem! Something that confused me is that these are frame-specific, so you need to add them to 'default-frame-alist or something like it.

Here's my working config:

  (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(ns-transparent-titlebar . t))
  (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(ns-appearance . 'nil)) ; or 'dark, to switch to white title text

[jwintz]

After a clean reinstall of my home-brew environment, I second @CarlQLane, the with-natural-title-bar option is no longer needed. I suggest to remove it from the formula.

[d12frosted]

@jwintz thanks for checking this out
Pull request is welcome 😸

[d12frosted]

Emacs 26.1 is out. And I've removed all 25.x options, so closing this issue 😸

Let me know if you have any questions/problems.