Tint the active window's "chrome" with the accent color

[ernstki]

It occurred to me recently that it's still farrrrrrr too difficult to tell the active application from inactive ones.

I don't have any vision impairments (yet), but this seems like it could even be an accessibility concern. The difference between "active" and "inactive" is really only discernible by a couple of steps of intensity change. If there are headerbar icons, their opacity changes slightly, too. But if you tile a follows-desktop-theme app (e.g. Code) next to a prefers-dark-theme app (e.g. Terminal), you really can't tell at a glance without ⌘+Tabbing.

There seems to be a lot of momentum behind "accent colors" nowadays, so is this an opportunity to use that accent color to tint the active window, or perhaps draw a thin colored border? Doesn't CSS have some "color multiply"-type features nowadays?

I've been using elementary since 0.4, and I've mostly learned to live with this, I guess. I'll press ⌘+Tab once or twice when I'm not sure. But this simply isn't necessary in other desktop environments, (with an appropriate window decoration theme) where the titlebar color readily cues you in to which window has focus. So upon reflection it just seems like a long-standing papercut with the elementary OS window decorations.

[teamcons]

I would suggest filing either an issue or a feature request against the stylesheet https://github.com/elementary/stylesheet/issues

So this can be properly tracked and added to boards.
Discussions are usually more for community support, and the devs mostly scan for bugs/features

On a more hacky note, i suppose you could add to .config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css a css line to display accent color for active windows
I would add a line like

.window:active {
border-style: solid;
border-color: @accent_color;
}

Or something like that, and see if next time gala boots up it picks it up
Personally i would love inactive windows to be slightly dimmed, and in all case would up proposals for more visible active/inactive distinction

[ernstki]

On a more hacky note, i suppose you could add to .config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css a css line to display accent color for active windows

I tinkered a bit, no luck yet. Poking around the Gala source code, I think window borders might be there, actually.