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Many features of Kwin, such as "Highlight Window", "Window Snapping" and when resizing (without showing content) currently use several methods to show where windows are, or where they could be.

This proposition is to create a mostly transparent "placeholder" defined by plasma themes that can show where windows are, where they could be, or how large they might become in a unified, elegant manner. Plasma themes without a specific "placeholder" graphic might fall back to a regular plasmoid container.

A few mockups of the intended results;

Great idea. Really I think it would be awsome to have something like this.

I definitely agree in the cases where a black border is used instead.
On the other hand, I don't agree with the windows fading to a plasma placeholder: it would feel too confusing, and disassociates the faded windows from the actual application (I may not know what each window actually is, e.g. how do I tell the Kopete window from the Skype window if I see the same thing for both?).

Windows have no reason to fade to plasma theme - if something like this is going to be implemented, the /placeholders/ should depend on the window decoration theme.

ivan wrote:Windows have no reason to fade to plasma theme - if something like this is going to be implemented, the /placeholders/ should depend on the window decoration theme.

That's true. The reason I suggested plasma was mostly because I was unsure about handling transparency. I don't know how window-decorators would deal with the entire window fill though, but I believe it can be done You see it when tweaking the kwin appearance settings.

Another realisation I had last week was on low-end computers without compositing turned on - the plasma-placeholders would be big, solid blocks as opposed to svelte transparent placeholders.

Maybe have an option to control what overall these effects will depend on? For example, have a universal setting for the composited default choosing between Universal black-borders-style, plasma-style and kwin-style. Maybe include an opacity option.

Black borders could be the default for non-composited systems though. That way, even if compositing is disabled, users can still use an effect like "highlight window" with black-borders, as it is a functional feature.

No matter what though, these placeholder effects need to be standardised - I think we can probably all agree with that.

Havinh settings to choose - b/w | plasma | kwin would be a bit too much.

IMO, it would be sufficient to do:
no compositing => b/w borders
compositing => kwin style

Marked as submitted: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=247316