Nice! A quick glance found one obvious issue (use of xprop to get window properties). Other than that, does this work in sys-gui and/or sys-gui-gpu? What happens if there is a fault (unexpected exception) somewhere in the extension? It is better to not display a window at all than to display one with an incorrect color. The ideal solution would be to display the window and the border as a single atomic operation, but if that is not possible, an alternative would be to first draw a window with the same color as the border, then the border, and then the real window.
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Yep I agree with you that using xprop is not the best way to get the window prop. Also, getting a qube label using spawn command is bad. However, this was a quick testing to come up with a solution to draw the colored borders. I would think of a better solutions.
Regarding sys-gui and sys-gui-gpu if they can run gnome-shell, I don’t see any issue running the extension on them. Unless you have specific concerns.
During the development a couple of unexpected errors occurred like missing a file or using a null object. The gnome-shell will raise an error and show a message in tweaks or extensions applications. Which requires reloading either by log-out or Alt+F2 then entering r. I think it depends where the error occurred in the code if it occurs before inserting the border in the window stack no border will be drawn.
I didn’t get the idea behind the ideal solution if you could explain more. But currently, the solution creates St.Bin objects and stack them as follow:
stack = [
application_window
st.bin
application_window
st.bin
.
.
.
]
I do not in any way want to change the flow of the topic, as I think it’s awesome to see some progress on maybe making another DE function for Qubes (just because I subconsciously like pretty things, but also very much like the Qubes OS structure and greatly appreciate its goals and incredible work in reaching them), but I just wondered if the Cinnamon DE might have made any useful changes to Gnome’s “opinionated”-ness that could be leveraged to customize border colors or something. I speak almost entirely in ignorance, but just as someone who knows Cinnamon was built on modification of Gnome, and who also just really likes using Cinnamon and knows its quite popular as well. The more traditional layout menus also remind me of how Qubes has XFCE set up right now, with the list of VMs that expand out to applications specific to each, so it seems like similar functionality in general could be obtained at least for the end user’s side (not necessarily behind the scenes, as I am discovering reading this post, though?).