Tuomo Valkonen wrote: >On Fri, Jun 27, 2003 at 12:14:29PM +0100, Sam Mason wrote: >> Tuomo Valkonen wrote: >> It seems to work in my version of X. > >I played with this a few weeks ago (thought of modifying xosd) and, I don't >think there's any true translucency but some trick that works half of the time >because X never fills the window with the background colour.
I'm well aware of the "hack" that most current terminals do to provide "translucent windows". All they do, is to grab a shot of what's underneath, then just do a blend at application level. I gave the source of the program I sent you a quick browse, and thought it was doing something different. I thought the code was using Xft, because that was the easiest way into the Xrender API - rather than because it's got some magic built in. I guess all thats happening, is that Xft contains the magic and nothing fundamental has changed. >What if the window in the background is changed? I agree, you need server support for this sort of thing. >I even looked up some KDE source code for >translucent menus and what they did is grab the screen area normally and then >combine the menu and the grab with Xrender for the effect. Sounds similar to the things I've seen. >And there's no reason why window translucency shouldn't work with normal >X drawing primitives as well because you _need_ a backing store for the >(visible areas of the) translucent window. I agree; and I think they will. All you, should, need to do is to specify the transparency of the various parts of the windows (probably with a grayscale-esque pixmap). And the server should take care of the rest. It would probably handle it by using a backing store for each window, but that's up to the server to decide how it wants to implement things. >(X -version => 4.2.1.1; I refuse to upgrade to 4.3 thanks to Xkb keymaps >that are not fully accessible with xmodmap. Dumping the current keymap >before upgrading might work but I'm not eager to try..) I'm a bit simplistic in this respect. I generally just run the latest of everything; and get pissed off with my package management system when it doesn't handle things nicely. <rant> I'm using a source based distribution, so why can't I say "automatically apply these patches to every version of this bit of software before you build it" let me know it goes wrong, but generally be a bit more intelligent that how it is at the moment. I'm hoping I'll get pissed off enough, to eventually to hack something together of my own designs. </rant> Sorry if that's a bit rushed, I'm supposed to be at home now, Sam
