Re: Compositing widgets in GTK2?

[Brett Granger <bdgranger alum mit edu>]

Thanks for the reply.

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Brett Granger <bdgranger@alum.mit.edu> writes: 
> 
>>I tried using the pixmap engine, and buttons do indeed seem to be able
>>to be translucent.  However, eventboxes don't seem to be able to (I
>>always get the png composited with the default gray background).  The
>>only difference between the two as far as I can tell is that buttons
>>use the BOX function whereas eventboxes use the FLAT_BOX function.
>>However, I can't see in the pixbuf engine source code why the two
>>should behave differently.
> 
> 
> Sorry for the late reply, was just looking at old messages. 
> 
> The difference is that buttons have the GTK_NO_WINDOW flag set,
> i.e. they do not have their own GdkWindow associated with them.

Yeah, I had figured that out by browsing the source a bit more.  I 
really wish I could convince X not to erase windows to a default 
background without making them input only.

What I would really like to do is be able to set the X root window 
background to anything I like, and then run apps that are largely 
transparent or translucent on top of this common background.  It appears 
that neither X nor GTK lend themselves to transparent windows (e.g. 
GdkColor has no alpha component).  Does anybody know if there is a 
framework or X extension for doing this sort of thing?  I read somewhere 
that the render extension really wasn't meant for this and that Keith 
Packard's translucent menus screen shot was not really functional...

Thanks again,
--Brett