Skip to content

Add an active-only border mode - #196

Open
qeude wants to merge 2 commits into
FelixKratz:mainfrom
qeude:feat/active-only-mode
Open

qeude wants to merge 2 commits into
FelixKratz:mainfrom
qeude:feat/active-only-mode

Conversation

@qeude

@qeude qeude commented Apr 23, 2026

Copy link
Copy Markdown

Summary

  • add an optional active_only=on mode that only keeps a border for the focused window
  • reuse the active border in active_only mode to reduce churn during focus changes
  • improve active_only responsiveness on space changes
  • document that inactive_color has no visible effect in active_only mode

Motivation

This adds a lower-memory mode for setups that do not need inactive window borders. The default behavior stays unchanged unless active_only=on is explicitly enabled.

Testing

  • make
  • manually ran borders active_only=on and verified focus changes and space changes still update the border
  • verified the default mode still builds and keeps the existing multi-window behavior

@qeude qeude changed the title feat: add active-only border mode Add an active-only border mode Apr 23, 2026
@Bellavene

Copy link
Copy Markdown

Why this overcomplication? Just set inactive to alpha color

@qeude

qeude commented Sep 18, 2026

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Author

@Bellavene because inactive to alpha uses resources still

@YetAnotherDev

Copy link
Copy Markdown

I would love this, I vibe coded a quick replacement that uses about 35mb (appkit) of memory and I have been using it but i assume that JB with this feature it would be even less without the appkit overhead. In its current configuration i have seen JB use over 500MB.

@qeude

qeude commented Sep 22, 2026

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Author

@YetAnotherDev I'm not using JB anymore as I started building my own open source window manager with this feature built-in but as far as I remember:

  • JB is actually interfacing this to AppKit under the hood (not 100% sure about this, it's been a while)
  • With that fix it was using ~30mb of memory

@Bellavene

Copy link
Copy Markdown

Dunno what you are talking about, my is using 60Mb of RAM right now.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Labels

None yet

Projects

None yet

Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

3 participants