Rounded UI corners and shadows?

SteamingBeer · 2022-11-20 20:03

I see many GUI apps implement rounded corners and shadows (usually in electron with CSS). Is something like that possible in emacs, for child frames etc? If not, is there a specific limitation that hinders it. I know it's something entirely preferential, but would be fascinating to know if it could be done.

eleven_cupfuls · 2022-11-20 21:23

The details of child frame behavior depend heavily on the window manager, but if you create one [with a frame parameter of `(undecorated . nil)`](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Management-Parameters.html#index-undecorated) you can see what chrome is available on your particular platform.

heartb1t · 2022-11-21 00:54

i don't think the UI is as configurable as with Electron apps, using CSS, mostly because of the fact that Emacs uses a very different UI engine. but it is still quite configurable! the most basic UI changes you can do is by configuring [faces](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Faces.html) (i recommend you take a look at the whole [Controlling the Display](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Display.html) section of the manual). going a bit beyond that, you can also take a look at the [Widget Library](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/widget.html) as well for buttons, links, checkboxes and some other stuff. and there is also some packages and hacks by the community to display SVGs. see [this](https://reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/qu6dp5/svg_hack_for_emacs_display_engine/) reddit post and also some of [Nicolas Rougier's work](https://github.com/rougier#emacs-hacking), more specifically his [SVG lib](https://github.com/rougier/svg-lib). hope that helps!

SteamingBeer · 2022-11-21 12:18

That might be exactly what I am looking for! I use Hyprland so it offers rounded corners, blur and shadows! Tried to play around with it and ivy-posframe but didn't have any success. Do you know if somebody has an example of this implementation somewhere? (Applying this frame parameter on a child frame)

eleven_cupfuls · 2022-11-21 18:38

You should be able to use [`ivy-posframe-parameters`](https://github.com/tumashu/ivy-posframe/blob/533a8e368fcabfd534761a5c685ce713376fa594/ivy-posframe.el#L199-L201) (setq ivy-posframe-parameters (list '(undecorated . nil))) Or you can play around [with `posframe-show` directly](https://github.com/tumashu/posframe/blob/48b7130ca3b5c98bdb21bf99b64a3536acf2b0eb/posframe.el#L308) and pass that as one of the `:override-parameters`.