On Thu, 2001-10-11 at 09:30, Lars Munch wrote:
> [...]
> Why is no one using this feature?
> Is it broken? is it to slow?
Another reason is that while the sample program makes you think it has
translucent windows, it really doesn't. It simply doesn't set a
background color on the window, which tells X to "use what was there
before the window was mapped", and then composits other figures on top
of this. If you move anything below the window, the window doesn't get
updated. (If you obscure the "translucent" window with another, and
then raise the translucent one, it looks like it works, but it's the
same thing.)
Until we have an X extension where one can explicitly give a RGBA value
to use as the window background and have the server handle the layers, I
doubt we will see any applications having translucent windows. Doing
this will also require the X server to compute update regions for
windows based on not only window geometry but also window translucency,
and will require sending redraw events to translucent windows if
anything below them changes (which normally wouldn't happen, as they
would obscure anything else on that spot).
Yes, it's possible to do some quick hacks for things which will only
appear above mostly-static content, like menus, as it will give the
right effect (mostly -- will look quite bad in, say, a video playing
application with a menubar), but it's almost not worth the effort at
this point.
- Vlad
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