MacOS – Remove Window Drop Shadow and Replace with Outline

customizationmacossettingsuiwindow-manager

I'm running OS X 10.8.4. My goal is to remove the wide drop shadows around windows and replace them with a thin black outline.

Several questions have been posted asking how to remove or reduce the drop shadows.

How do I decrease the window shadow in Mac OS X?

Disable drop shadows around windows or the menu bar on OS X

How can I remove the window shadow in Mountain Lion?

Mountain Lion – scale down the window shadows

How to remove window decoration under OSX?

I didn't have luck with any of the posted answers. All the programs mentioned are either no longer hosted or don't run on 10.8.4. However, I did find a program named ShadowSweeper that does remove the drop shadows.

http://download.cnet.com/ShadowSweeper/3000-2072_4-75966596.html

One of the questions above also mentions this program which I didn't try but it looks like it might work.

https://github.com/puffnfresh/toggle-osx-shadows

I have ShadowSweeper running on start up and now I can tile windows together without drop shadows occluding windows. The problem is that there's no border between separate windows. The aesthetic is odd and it becomes confusing when windows of the same color are on top of one another.

The ideal solution would be a thin border around each window. How can this be achieved?

Alternatively, is there a better way to tile windows without the drop shadow obscuring neighboring windows while keeping each window visually distinct?

iTerm windows without drop shadow

Update: I don't think there will be an answer any time soon but since this question does seem to get some traffic I thought it would be worth sharing how I tile windows together since I mentioned it in the question. I use Slate. This SO question has some alternatives that look fine too. I normally have 2 windows side by side perfectly tiled with the dock hidden. It's quite nice.

Update 2: Shadow Sweeper does not work on El Capitan and gives an error message saying a fix is unlikely to be found.

Best Answer

Try this application, it has a LOT of OSX modifications:

http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html