InactivePanes (deprecated)

InactivePanes has been deprecated and is no longer needed because its functionality has been integrated into Sublime Text 4 natively (released on 2021-05-20), making this giant hack redundant.

The default themes support this natively and the behavior can be disabled with the inactive_sheet_dimming setting. If you are using a third-party theme that does not support this already, refer to the details in the following issue comment:

https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/2041#issuecomment-765531886

You can manually add this to the theme you are using following these instructions:

1. Open the Command Palette.
2. Select UI: Customize Theme.
3. On the right panel, add the following entries to the rules array:

{
           "class": "sheet_contents",
           "background_modifier": "",
        },
        {
            "class": "sheet_contents",
            "settings": {"inactive_sheet_dimming": true},
            "attributes": ["file_dark", "!highlighted"],
            "background_modifier": "blend(white 98%)",
        },
        {
           "class": "sheet_contents",
           "settings": {"inactive_sheet_dimming": true},
           "attributes": ["file_light", "!highlighted"],
           "background_modifier": "blend(black 90%)",
        },

You may adjust the background_modifier as needed (also for the default themes) using a color modifier as documented below.

https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/minihtml.html#color-mod-function-proprietary

Following is the original README.

InactivePanes is a plugin for Sublime Text 2 and 3 that will dim the currently visible but inactivate panes to show you more visibly where your caret is and which view is focussed. Really useful with the Origami plugin or ST3's native panel handling.

This plugin could have incompatabilities with other plugins that modify color schemes programmatically, but so far no issues have been found. Please report errors you do encounter with this plugin here, also if they are not related to other plugins.

Originally created by adzenith, maintained by FichteFoll.

Installation

You can install this package from Package Control as “InactivePanes”.

Usage

Views in inactive groups will automatically dimmed automatically when you install it.

When you want to disable this package, use Package Control's Disable Package and Enable Package commands. Alternatively you can adjust your "ignored_packages" setting manually.

Warning: If you want to remove the package, use Package Control's Remove Package command. Do not delete the plugin folder by yourself if you didn't disable the package before and ST is not running! This will cause various error messages because of outdated file references (but nothing critical).

Configuration

The following settings can be specified everywhere where you'd specify a color_scheme - user settings (Preferences > Settings - User), syntax-specific (Preferences > Settings - More > Syntax Specific - User) or project settings. Thus, you can adjust each color scheme separately to blend with your theme's sidebar for example.

• "inactive_panes_dim_color" (default: "#7F7F7F", gray)

  Change the color to dim to. Must be in the format #RRGGBB with hexadecimal numbers.

• "inactive_panes_dim_strength" (default: 0.2)

  Change the dim strength; ranges from 0 (no modification) to 1 (everything will be changed to the color set above).

Images

Dark Scheme

Using a modified Twilight color scheme with a dim strength of 0.1:

Bright Scheme

Using the bundled LAZY color scheme with a dim strength of 0.3:

Custom Color

Using a modified Twilight color scheme with a custom color of "#7F7F00" and dim strength of 0.1:

Known Issues

• When opening the same file in two groups (with command palette or by cloning it), both of the views will be marked as inactive. This is caused by an underlying Sublime Text bug (https://github.com/SublimeTextIssues/Core/issues/731) and can be worked around by restarting Sublime Text after cloning.

About

InactivePanes is a split from Origami which once included this feature but due to various issues it was removed. I extracted relevant commits (for retaining the commit history) from the Origami repo to keep developing this feature because I've used it ever since and think that it's really useful.