JankyBorders

JankyBorders is a lightweight tool designed to add colored borders to user windows on macOS 14.0+. It enhances the user experience by visually highlighting the currently focused window without relying on the accessibility API, thereby being faster than comparable tools.

Usage

Compile the source code to a binary using make in the cloned repository or install the binary via brew:

brew tap FelixKratz/formulae
brew install borders

The binary can be started via borders and takes any of the arguments (in arbitrary order and count):

• active_color=<color>
• inactive_color=<color>
• width=<float>
• style=<round/square>
• hidpi=<off/on>

Those determine the color of the currently focused window, the inactive window and the width, style and resolution of the border respectively. The color hex shall be given in the format: 0xAARRGGBB, where A is the alpha channel, R the red channel, G the green channel and B the blue channel. The color argument can take the special values:

• gradient(top_left=0xAARRGGBB,bottom_right=0xAARRGGBB)
• gradient(top_right=0xAARRGGBB,bottom_left=0xAARRGGBB) to create a gradient border. (You might need to quote these arguments depending on your shell)

If a borders process is already running, invoking a new borders instance with any combination of the above arguments will update the properties of the already running instance (just like in yabai and sketchybar).

Bootstrap with yabai

For example, if you are using yabai, you could add:

borders active_color=0xffe1e3e4 inactive_color=0xff494d64 width=5.0 &

to the very end of your yabairc.

Bootstrap with brew

If you want to run this as a separate service, you could also use:

brew services start borders

If the primary borders process is started without any arguments (or launched as a service by brew), it will search for a file at ~/.config/borders/ bordersrc and execute it on launch if found.

Documentation

Local documentation is available as man borders.