Borderless Mining — a Mod for Running Minecraft in Borderless Fullscreen Windowed Mode

Borderless Mining — a Mod for Running Minecraft in Borderless Fullscreen Windowed Mode

Borderless Mining replaces Minecraft's standard fullscreen mode with a borderless window that fills the entire monitor. Vanilla fullscreen minimizes the game when it loses focus — the mod eliminates this: the window stays visible when you switch to a browser, voice chat, or any other program.

What Changes in the Game

The behavior of the F11 key and the fullscreen option in the Video Settings menu is rewritten: instead of true fullscreen, a borderless window expanded to cover the entire screen is enabled. Visually it looks just like real fullscreen, but Alt+Tab, moving the mouse to an adjacent monitor, or bringing other windows on top no longer force Minecraft to minimize.

A separate Borderless Window toggle is added to the same Video Settings menu, letting you quickly switch back to vanilla behavior without restarting the game.

The Borderless Window option in the Video Settings menu.

Caveats

On macOS the mod is disabled by default: the window cannot be placed over the global menu bar at the top of the screen, and macOS's own fullscreen mechanism already doesn't minimize the game on Alt+Tab. You can force-enable it, but the top strip will remain covered.

For non-standard scenarios — a fixed window size for stream recording, pinning to a specific display in a multi-monitor setup — the file .minecraft/config/borderlessmining.json has the corresponding fields. Most players won't need these settings: the default behavior is to fully fill the current monitor.

Config

The file .minecraft/config/borderlessmining.json stores all of the mod's settings. Manual editing is mostly needed for multi-monitor scenarios and fixed window sizes.

Conclusion

Borderless Mining gives you instant switching between Minecraft and other programs without the game minimizing. Compared to vanilla F11, transitions become smooth, but you lose the benefit of exclusive fullscreen mode, where the OS can allocate more graphics buffer resources to the game. It's a good fit for streamers and players with two or more monitors; on a single-monitor setup the difference is barely noticeable.