Transparent future
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Not being able to set my mind to doing anything useful, I played a little with rgba windows. For a future version of Xfce that can depend on cairo-based versions of Gtk, it should be possible to only make the panel background transparent, while keeping text and icons fully opaque. Just changing the panel window and the base plugin classes, I got the following result:
Not too bad. All widgets that have their own X window, or that do some custome drawing are not transparent, but the others are. I had to choose a theme with white foreground text to make labels somewhat readable. That will require special attention to get right. Shadows or outlines maybe… |
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want to have it
Comment by McMax — 1 Oct 2006 @ 18:01:58 UTC
http://www.loculus.nl/xfce/files/panel-cairo.patch
It’s a quick, dirty hack. Use at your own risk.
Comment by Jasper — 1 Oct 2006 @ 18:16:55 UTC
It is really nice. I find Xfce to be developing rather nicely. Infact, I find it much more pleasant to use xfce than any other window manager. And I am sure it will be looked at par with the heavyweights gnome and kde in the number of features it sports.
I do have one request though (as I feel, it could be relatively easily implemented -though please correct me if I am wrong). That is when I open any application in xfce, there should be some provision to make xfce remember the last position of the application. For example, if I open xfce-terminal, it opens in the top left corner of my monitor. And I have to drag it each time to the center of the monitor. It would be nice if xfce remembers the last position of the app and opens the app in the same position the next time it is opened. I believe this and a few related features are present in Enlightenment. But that WM is still really buggy.
Comment by Ravi — 3 Oct 2006 @ 13:20:19 UTC
Is this an excelent feature. Is done with X-Composite? Would be nice if it wasn’t since X-Composite is kinda too heavy for some computers.
Comment by Nomius — 10 Dec 2006 @ 15:06:08 UTC
Something weird happened with Gaim 2 in Systray Plugin when I tested this.. It opened second window with no content, like an GTK+ app which has no functionality and I couldn’t get rid of it. Also normal window of Gaim 2 wouldn’t go into Systray anymore, well it did, but it also showed up in Taskbar then.
Like you said, dirty hack so I’m not complaining.. looks cool though :)
Comment by Samuli "drac" Suominen — 11 Dec 2006 @ 17:13:21 UTC
I only recently discovered XFCE’s transparency support and, having tried beryl, I was delighted with the simple configuration yet excellent results.
There are, of course, a few aspects of the major compositing WMs which a few will “demand” in XFCE. While I don’t want to be one of those people this blog post has led me to openly ask how doable a few of my “requests” would be. For example, opaque text on translucent window titles would be one, and I can see that this would not be a big step from the panel patch mentioned here. My other request though would be underlying window blurring, which is essential for great looking terminals – just how doable would that be with the current engine? Is that something that we can hope for given time and effort or is a chilly day in hell more likely?
Comment by dtw — 21 Dec 2006 @ 14:37:10 UTC
dtw, transparent terminal with opaque text is probably the most useful application of rgba visuals. Apparently, Mike Massonnet created a patch for Terminal to do just that: http://mmassonnet.blogspot.com/2006/11/real-traparent-terminal-yet-again.html .Maybe that will work for you?
Comment by Jasper — 21 Dec 2006 @ 20:26:29 UTC
I’ve always hated panels, taskbars, etc. laying around the desktop and the ‘autohide’ feature of these widgets annoys the Hades out of me. Transparency solves it for me; it’s immediately available when I need it, but not distracting when I don’t.
The only “complaint” I have is that not all of the panel-plugins become transparent with this patch applied. That’s a feature I’d like to see. But, hey, I understand you can’t force the plugin devs to adopt something unofficial.
In any event, if you continue to work on this feature, I’ll keep applying the latest patch I can get my hands on. Thanks!
Comment by weibullguy — 2 Feb 2007 @ 18:27:17 UTC
Uhm… if you need some inspiration , may you provide one way to place the handler on the top of Launchers, as in previous versions of XFCE, instead to place in the side? Or, almost, to decide which side to place the handler on Launchers??
:) :)
I know, i’m boring, but this is something i liked so much… :)
Uriel
P.S: of course, thank you for your work…
Comment by Uriel — 20 Mar 2007 @ 15:20:24 UTC
hello,
I have download the script on http://www.loculus.nl/xfce/files/panel-cairo.patch.
Shall you explain to me how install it ? please.
thanks
Comment by Jean-Sèb — 2 May 2007 @ 16:24:52 UTC
Any chance you will make one of these for the newest version of xfce?
Comment by Brandon — 29 May 2007 @ 22:23:39 UTC
Why oh why do you love Nvidia so much? Give us ATI fans some love!
Comment by Michael — 12 Jun 2007 @ 17:43:41 UTC
#
It is really nice. I find Xfce to be developing rather nicely. Infact, I find it much more pleasant to use xfce than any other window manager. And I am sure it will be looked at par with the heavyweights gnome and kde in the number of features it sports.
I do have one request though (as I feel, it could be relatively easily implemented -though please correct me if I am wrong). That is when I open any application in xfce, there should be some provision to make xfce remember the last position of the application. For example, if I open xfce-terminal, it opens in the top left corner of my monitor. And I have to drag it each time to the center of the monitor. It would be nice if xfce remembers the last position of the app and opens the app in the same position the next time it is opened. I believe this and a few related features are present in Enlightenment. But that WM is still really buggy.
Comment by body piercings shops — 16 Oct 2007 @ 21:36:30 UTC
I tried out the version of the patch at http://www.loculus.nl/xfce/files/panel-cairo-20070125.patch – looks very nice, except the Gnome notification icons are in separate windows, with grey boxes in the panel where they should be.
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