Comment 13 for bug 1281368

I agree that borderless looks better overall, since most windows are light and end up with a shadow that makes them easy to differentiate. However, since I've heard multiple times that we need to make the Unity desktop a delight for developers, the terminal use case is very important. I typically have many terminals (white text on black background-- a common terminal configuration) open at once and things start to look really weird when those terminals overlap since it is difficult to differentiate between them. Because of opacity, if the terminals are over another window or background that is light, then it is somewhat possible in a non-bright room to differentiate. When two terminals overlap over a dark background/dark window (eg, a third terminal) it becomes quite difficult to differentiate. Attached is a screenshot-- note, the brighter the room, the harder to differentiate (also, with the png I've attached it is actually slightly easier to differentiate than when looking at the actual windows on my monitor).

This has created a usability issue for me if I want to resize one of these overlapping terminals since I have to slowly drag the mouse to see the edge. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I'm a developer (among other things) and I spend much of my time looking at terminals and this change made my desktop more difficult to use. I've also heard 2 other people independently, without prompting say the same thing. One idea would be to blacklist various terminals from being borderless but have everything else be borderless. Perhaps a better idea would be to allow people to opt out of borderless for certain windows, or expose opting out of borderless entirely in Appearance (personally, I don't like this last one-- I like borderless windows for the most part, just not with terminals). Maybe there is another more creative solution that works better for everyone.