> I was looking for ways to make the focused window clearer. The best
 > way would probably a slightly lighter background.
 >
 > However, I couldn't find any hooks to easily do that. I was expecting
 > something along the lines of `window-leave-hook' and
 > `window-focus-hook' but I couldn't find anything similar.
 >
 > The best suggestion that the IRC people came up with is to use
 > `post-command-hook' and match `switch-buffer',

What is `switch-buffer'?

 > but that sounds a bit
 > ugly. Is there a better way?

I don't think that using `post-command-hook' is a priori bad in this
case.  Doing it on a `window-leave-hook' or `window-focus-hook' would
mean you'd have to do that background setting whenever you leave a
window or change the focus, which can happen a couple of times during
one and the same command.  Obviously `post-command-hook' will fail when
the focus changes asynchronously but I think such cases should be rare.

I attach an old version which can run into a problem I forgot about.
There's a better way to provide whole-window overlays for Emacs 24.1 but
I didn't implement them yet.  If you use Emacs 24, I can look into this.

martin