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I use keyboard shortcuts rather heavily. I have a dual monitor setup. I also have virtuawin so I can switch between desktops.

The result of all this is that sometimes I will start using keyboard shortcuts in the wrong window. This can have disastrous effects. For example, what if I think I'm in firefox and use Ctrl-L to go to the location bar, but instead I end up deleting a line in Visual Studio 2008 (without noticing it?!). This could be very, very bad.

Is there a way that I can make it blindingly obvious which window is active? For example, could I find some tool which will gray out any inactive windows?

I would be willing to use autohotkey or a variety of other advanced tools to set up a solution.

Thanks.

K Robinson
  • 1,069

3 Answers3

4

For Windows 10

I found this question while googling for this same issue on windows 10 and wanted to log my answer for others like me (even though this question was originally about winxp) :

open "Settings" app
-> "Personalization" tile
-> sidebar: "Colors"
-> scroll to "More options"
-> "Show accent color on the following surfaces"
-> check the box next to "Title bars"

Now the focused window will have a coloured title bar, and the other windows will have a white title bar.

Beware: this doesn't work on programs that don't use the windows color settings (spotify comes to mind) but as long as they're the exception and not the rule that shouldn't be an issue.

mic84
  • 2,413
Joran Dox
  • 143
4

Are you looking for more granularity than this?

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BillP3rd
  • 6,599
2

Check out this AutoHotKey script.

digitxp
  • 14,884