Amethyst: Highlight active window

[ianyh]

Should be pretty straightforward and would certainly save me a lot of headache. Could do something like https://github.com/puffnfresh/Honer.app.

Trello Card

[simon-weber]

:+1: this would be great!

[durdn]

I'd like this too :D.

[tuananh]

:+1:

[gregspurrier]

+1 to this request.

[ianyh]

If you guys vote on the trello card it's a lot easier to track +1s. :)

[nathanleiby]

:+1: (and voting on the trello card!)

[mrjnox]

I've used Honer in the past, but had to stop because of this bug:

1. Cmd+Shift+4 to take a partial screenshot
2. Hit 'space' to switch to window-locking mode
3. Click on a window you want to take a screenshot of
4. Screenshot is only of Honer overlay, essentially giving you a completely blank screenshot with an outline at the edge

I understand this is due to Honer being its own application that draws a lay on top of other windows, but if there was a way around this, it would be much appreciated.

[ianyh]

The screenshot thing is something I hadn't considered. Thanks!

[Hultner]

@ianyh @mrjnox I started to experiment with another tilling window manager for macOS on one of my computers at work and found this handy little script: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/dominiklohmann/20973dbe7c78870e6026/raw/fea8c78f637d13c57ac54c3f15bf32e64d8f399a/screencapture

It disables the border right before the screenshot is taken and then reenables it. Should probably be applicable here as well.

[ianyh]

I believe that script only works as a result of how kwm does keyboard shortcuts. I believe it hooks in at a lower level than Amethyst does. It's the same level that the system uses before it dispatches events so it actually prevents the system from getting the keyboard events if kwm is registered to handle them. There are pros and cons to that approach. The primary downside in my opinion is that it silently overrides system commands, but that does have the upside of effectively being able to _rewrite_ system commands, which is what that script is doing. It's taking the default system commands for capturing screenshots and overriding them to point towards a wrapper that shuts off the window highlight for the screenshot.

[ianyh]

I had an idea for this. Instead of one window with a border we can use 4 windows, one for each edge.

[deecewan]

FWIW, I just installed honer (because I rarely if ever use windowed screenshotting, so focus highlighting was more important) and I tested out a windowed screenshot - it works as expected. macOS Mojave.

[ianyh]

Looking at Honer's code it looks like screenshots (at least as of Mojave) are smart enough to ignore space with windows that have nothing drawn in them. This should be workable now.

[cdisselkoen]

Instead of drawing a border, one could also go with an approach like https://hazeover.com/, and dim unfocused windows. Presumably the amount of dimming is configurable.

[ianyh]

I personally wouldn't want that. My usual use case for wanting to know which window is focused is that I can find where my text input is going rather than wanting to literally be focused on it.

[jesse-troy]

I would very much appreciate this. For now there is NeuHoner (https://macplus-software.com/downloads/NeuHoner.dmg) which is free and does not blur unfocused windows. Unfortunately that app is not open source and is not even configurable (red highlight only, etc).

I've been using Amethyst ever since my move to MacOS about 2 months ago and this is definitely my most wanted feature.

[muhammad-saleh]

@jesse-troy I think that NeuHoner is sketchy! it's not open source and there have been demands on Honer's repo to release the source code but no one is replying
Please check here:
https://github.com/puffnfresh/Honer.app/issues/18

Please check here for an alternative solution:
https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst/issues/1007