change color of window in win 7

Question

I'm using cygwin/X-Sever to ssh into several other machines and then open the same control pannels on each machine. Is it possible to color the Top window bar differently for each one? Either using X11 or windows?

Clientside: Win7 - Cygwin

Serverside: Unix & Linux

Answer 1

If you were using Linux as a client, this could be done clientside using a nice window manager like i3 by just applying a different window decoration style based on namespace.

Now because you're using Windows 7 with cygwin, my best guess is that you're using XWin for Xserver. I am not aware of built-in functionality to XWin that would allow you do to this easily client-side. You said you're opening remote "control panels" on each machine, but not if they are GUI or CLI applications.

For CLI applications, you can set the background and foreground colour on a remote xterm session when connecting with startxwin as the Examples section of the man page shows.

For GUI applications, the simplest solution may be to follow what I described in the first paragraph but server-side. Using ssh this would be easy to script, just set a custom window manager theme on the remote host for the application at runtime. Your remote host window manager's documentation should explain how to configure there.