No visual indication of which tab is in focus

[byron-hawkins]

In my session there are 3 tabs arranged left-to-right, and my cursor is a non-blinking i-beam. When focus moves from one tab to another, there is no visual indication, making it difficult to see which tab has focus. For now I've done this:

1. set the application title to show the terminal title
2. set the terminal title to include its id

Now at least the application title shows a number indicating which tab has focus. But it would be much nicer for the entire tab titlebar to change color when it gains or loses focus. Consider also that the space taken by the tab titlebar has little working value and might otherwise be completely hidden.

If there is already some way to accomplish what I'm asking here, please explain. But I've searched the documentation and issues, along with all the obvious configuration panels, and there does not seem to be any means of either triggering an action on tab focus, or ever changing the color of a tab titlebar.

[byron-hawkins]

Looks like this could be done with a little css by listening to focus events in source/gx/tilix/terminal/terminal.d to add and remove highlight attributes on the terminal-titlebar element. Might give this a try, though it would be hardcoded (at first, anyway) ,since the preferences look fairly complicated. Any suggestions or advice would be much appreciated!

[egmontkob]

I don't think you'd need to touch the source code and dynamically add/remove attributes... after all, CSS should be able to select based on whether an element is focused or not.

[byron-hawkins]

My local build works, but adding the following to data/resources/css/tilix.base.theme.css doesn't seem to have any effect:

.terminal-titlebar {                                                                                                                                                                                       
    border-bottom: 1px solid @borders;                                                                                                                                                                     
+    background-color: #000099;                                                                                                                                                                             
}  

Built with dub build --build=release --force. Does the titlebar also need to be made opaque or something?

It looks like there is support for custom themes, but does it allow custom css? There doesn't seem to be anything about that in README.md.

[237dmitry]

Could it depend on gtk-theme? In my environment - arch, xfce4 (x11), active tab is highlited

[byron-hawkins]

Changing settings in gnome doesn't seem to have any effect on the terminal tabs. Within my tilix profile, changing options in "use theme colors for foreground/background" had no effect either. So far, all I can do is set the unfocused dim, which makes it very clear which tab is in focus, but makes the unfocused tabs totally unreadable! Changes to css are not taking effect because they get clobbered by dynamic css attributes. Possible workarounds:

1. find out if any gnome theme settings are involved, and try to change or block them
2. there seems to be tilix code to dynamically set terminal-titlebar attributes, so maybe that can be modified--either to permit static css for the terminal-titlebar coloring, or to dynamically set the coloring on focus change

[237dmitry]

settings in gnome

From my observation, most of the issues are related to using the terminal in the Gnome environment. Gnome is going ahead, tilix is stopped, IMHO.

[byron-hawkins]

tilix is stopped

Do you know of a fork that might be more active and reliable enough for ordinary usage?