glimmer

What

A tool for decorating i3 windows when they get focused, written in Rust.

classic.mp4

Why

When using i3-gaps I ran into the following problems.

• Glitches when using regular borders and titlebars that showed up in the background (as described here), which as far as I know haven't been solved yet.
• The above meant usually relying on transparency or dimming to have a 'highlighted' state, which for me at least beats the purpose of having all your windows in a tiled fashion. To get the highlighted effect you have to lower the opacity or dim it to the point it's too hard to read.
• Even if borders and titlebars did work properly. They just don't gel very well with the a e s t h e t i c anyway.

Eventually I gave up and continued using vanilla i3 instead, but had this idea floating around. It focuses on those shortcomings. Does it solve them? Not too sure myself, but it was a fun experiment.

Requirements

• i3 (Note that Sway is not currently supported)
• A compositor, since it literally draws windows on top of your windows.
• GTK needs to be on your system to build this application, follow the instructions here

For building:

• Rust v1.5x, currently only tested with v1.53.0

cargo build && cargo run

Installation

Pre built binaries

You can download a pre built-binary from the releases page

Cargo

Remember to read the requirements above!

cargo install glimmer

Running and customizing

glimmer --styles=./path/to/your/theme.css

The css file dictates how the window decorations look like, and they have 2 elements to customize, #box which represents the boundaries of the window and #label, which has the window title. Additionally, there's an .animate class applied to the parent which can help triggering animations for both the box and label.

There are some examples of this in the themes directory. Feel free to contribute more!

Note that the CSS is not full spec, and you can see the supported properties by GTK here

A simple example for this, animated using transitions:

#box {
  background: rgba(255, 200, 0, 0.2);
  transition: background 2s ease, margin 0.2s ease;
  margin: 10px;
}

.animate #box {
  background: transparent;
  margin: 0px;
}

#label {
  opacity: 0; /* Hide the label */
}

This will produce the following

flash.mp4