Alpha Focus Highlight

Patch for suckless' simple terminal (st), which allows the user to specify two distinct opacity values / background colors; one for the focused- and one for unfocused windows' background. This enables the user to spot the focused window at a glance. The patch is based on the alpha patch; i.e. is to be applied after applying the alpha patch.

The patch is released on this release page and on the suckless page. Please leave a star.

Contributions & Bug Reports

• Report / Solve Patching issues with a new version of st
• Contributions and Bug reports

Building, customizing and installing the patch

1. Optional Dependencies The opacity functionality of this patch requires an X composite manager (e.g. picom, compton, xcompmgr), which can for instance be installed via sudo pacman -S picom on Arch Linux and launched via picom -b. The composite manager has to be relaunched after booting.

2. Applying the patch Apply the patch to st's source code and build code via patch < [PATCH_NAME]

3. Customization This patch performs changes in the config.def.h file, which need to be manually merged into a pre-existing custom config.h file. The following four variables can be adapted:

• alpha/alphaUnfocused opacity of the terminal when focused / not focused.
• bg/bgUnfocused background color when focused / not focused.

4. Build & install make; sudo make install

Download

If you want to try out the current version of the patch before patching your own build, check out this repository, which contains a merged version of this patch with a reasonable configuration.

The patch comes

1. merged into the alpha patch (alpha + focus) or
2. for patching on top of an already applied alpha patch (focus)

I recommend downloading the alpha patch from the alpha patch page and using Patch: focus, that way you make sure that you apply the latest version of the alpha patch.

Note that patch errors can occur when the code in the st repo is updated. Please report an Issue or contribute a merged patch in that case.

Patch: alpha + focus

st-0.9

• Version 2(attached)
• Most recent release st-focus-20230610-68d1ad9.diff Github

st-0.8.3

• Version 1 (attached)
• Most recent release: st-focus-20200530-43a395a.diff Github

Patch: focus

st-0.8.3

• Version 1 (attached)
• Most recent release: st-focus-20200530-patch_alpha.diff (Github)

MISC

Note: The benefit of the alpha patch and the Alpha Focus Highlight patch are the ability to restrict the transparency only to the background color currently in use, hence keeping the font in the foreground solid and readable.

If the goal is to apply transparency independent on the content, you do not require any patch for st, instead add inactive-opacity = 0.2; active-opacity = 0.8; to your picom configuration file and keep a vanilla st build.

If you want to configure inactive-opacity and active-opacity rules in order to apply opacity to other applications, but keep the benefits of the st alpha patches, have a look at this picom configuration file, in which opacity management configured to be performed by st.

Authors / Contributors

• Julius Hülsmann - <juliusHuelsmann [at] gmail [dot] com>
• Wim Stockman: Fix erroneous color reset
• glpub: Fix: erroneous color reset
• Milos Stojanovic: Code Formatting
• Yui: Fix spelling errors
• Authors of the shipped alpha patch: Eon S. Jeon, pr, Laslo Hunhold, Ivan J., Matthew Parnell, Johannes Mayrhofer, Àlex Ramírez