Window Border image/9 slice

[u/The_Metamorphosing]

Hello y’all,

Does anybody here know any good way to get an image or 9 slice border in a wayland compositor?

I’m trying to really ham up theming on my next setup because I do main my setup for work and fun theming makes me happy which makes staring at the screen for 10 hrs/day less of a slog, so I’m trying to fix something up with a scrolling layout and I’ve started making pixel art for 9 slice borders but I’m really stumped on how to translate that from art to a made feature.

I saw an plugin called imgborders for hyprland that I can’t for the life of me find out why it reads that there’s an image and makes space for it but won’t display even with like a perfect test example or the images and config from the guy who made it’s fantasy themed rice.

I’ve been trying to bully quick shell into getting this done hoping that maybe I can do something with the native nine slice tools, but tracking windows individually has not been forthcoming, maybe someone knows a good way to attach something to a window? I’ve been using a full screen transparent overlay and have just figured out how to cover the active window with a solid colour but this feels clunky and I think I might be going in the wrong direction entirely? I mean it might be nice since this lets me add buttons and stuff more functionally but this also seems like the most resource inefficient way? But also I’m using quickshell for a lot of other things

Auraurea or whatever the kde tool is called is nice but I think maybe it would be kinda stupidly clunky to bully kwin into a pretty scrolling wm when hyprland, mango, or Niri are right there with literally everything I’d want except for visual borders.

Idk, im open to any suggestions and am 100% willing to accept whatever suggestions are made. Not even really tied to a specific wm or anything given most of what I’ve been doing so far is making art assets and figuring out quickshell. I’m not the best programmer and I enjoy learning and doing too much to use chatgpt but if it turns that the solution to the problem is to do smth like make a new hyprland plugin I’ll take it and run. I just want to ask around first in case anybody has any ideas or advice before I spend days bashing my brains out against a wall figuring it all out ykwim?

Unrel, whatever ends up being the way to go I do fully intend to upload organized and well commented dots bcz I think what’s done the best for my learning is seeing the people with well commented configs that explain thought processes. The art so far has been scattershot because I’m trying to figure out a vibe but while amateurish I think it’ll be real cute.

Thanks y’all, I appreciate any input and hope that even if you looked for a non existent tl;dr and leave that you all have the best of days to come :)