any way to force borderless apps to show border

Question

I have noticed recent tendency with new windows apps to not have borders. Github Desktop, MS Teams, VS Code. It hurts my brain and eyes to make out edges of the applications every single time. There is literally no borders, no shadows, not a single pixel line, nothing at all.

Am I missing something? Am I not doing something correctly? Am I the only one who get that feeling of frustration?

Does anyone know and can explain why and how that is done? Does anyone know any workarounds or a ways to force some kind of a border (even a shadow will work)?

Answer 1

I can only offer an answer for VS Code. You need to set the value of "Title Bar Style" (in the "Window" section of settings) to "native", and allow the application to restart. You can find that setting easily by hitting [Ctrl + ,] to open the settings window, and then using the "search settings" feature at the top to search for "title bar style".

I found this by looking through the VS Code source code for occurrences of the "frame" option for Electron (which is the framework that VS Code is built with). The snippet I found in src/vs/code/electron-main/window.ts is:

if (useCustomTitleStyle) {
    options.titleBarStyle = 'hidden';
    this.hiddenTitleBarStyle = true;
    if (!isMacintosh) {
        options.frame = false;
    }
}

It's slightly odd that it only turns the frame off on a non-Macintosh OS. It might be better if that setting for options.frame was settable separately to the useCustomTitleStyle setting.

Github Desktop and MS Teams (as far as I can tell by a quick search) also use the Electron framework, so perhaps there is a similar way to enable the frame for those too.