I thought I was finished writing about marking the active Emacs window so that it stands out. It all started with my post on James Dyer’s method of placing a red line on the left hand fringe. I liked his solution but thought that simply coloring the mode line would be better.
Ignacio Paz Posse left a comment to that post showing that it was actually very easy to do. I immediately tried his solution and thought it was perfect. Since then, three new things have happened or come to light.
- Sacha Chua also implemented Posse’s solution. She chose a light blue (
bg-blue-subtle) that looks nice but doesn’t stand out enough for my taste. - I changed the color I was using from
dark goldenrodtogoldenrod. It still stands out but isn’t quite as dark and doesn’t swallow the non-black foreground colors as much. I also changed the attribute frommode-linetomode-line-active. I think I understand why justmode-lineworks but it’s nice to be precise when you can be. - Dyer rewrote his code to fix a conflict with
visual-fill-column-mode. That was easy so if you like the idea of marking the active window with a left red fringe. his post explaining the fix is here.
In any event, there’s no reason to live with the hard-to-discern gray/light-gray default. As far as I’m concerned, something more distinguishable should be the default but I can only imagine the uproar that would result if that default were changed.