Feature request for zvt (gnome-terminal)

[Rene Chaddock <renec zorro pangea ca>]

Hi,

I would like to request a feature that is sorely needed in gnome-terminal
(and zvt).. 

Basically, I need to have different amounts of shading for my windows.
I use transparent windows with shading, but the default shading only
seems to shade things about 50%. This makes my text quite hard to read
against certain parts of my background.

I've used Eterm, but I prefer not to go back to it because its rather bloated
and slow.


I actually tried to get this done myself, so I checked out gnome-libs from
CVS. In zvt, I found the shading is done in background.c. Apparently
the amount it is shaded is given as a value from 0->65536, and is shifted
8 bits to the right to give a value from 0->256 (for each of the three rgb 
colours, or all of 'em at once)... 

So this seems pretty simple, right? I could just change the default of 32768
to about 53000, which is what I want.. 

But unfortunately, when I tried to compile gnome-libs I got some message about how
I was clearly too stupid to possibly be a gnome developer, that I was not to be
using the CVS version of gnome-libs, and I should be getting gnome-libs version
1.0!!!

Doubly unfortunately, when I tried to snag the source for the version I am currently
using (1.2.4), I found that the source for setting the background shading is completely
different than zvt in CVS - and not anywhere near as clear. So I had no idea how to actually
change the percentage of shading :)


So I've resigned myself to the fact that somebody else will have to do this..

The actual feature request:

I think that in addition to being able to check off 'shade background' in the preferences,
that a simple text box should exist that lets you type in the percentage of shading you would
like.

gnome-terminal uses zvt_term_set_background(stuff here) to set the background options.
zvt_term_set_background takes an integer called 'flags'. From what I can see (and I may be wrong)
this seems to have '1' as a value for shading being on, and '0' for shading off. There is a test
along the lines of 

if (flags) {
  //do transparency stuff here with hardcoded 32768 value
}

So I'm thinking that it would be easy enough to take the value entered for
the percentage shading by the user, and multiply that by 65536/100, and get a
value that can be passed as the 'flags' parameter.

Then presto, it all works. I'm sort of dying with the only-50%-shading
deal, and it looks like I'm going to have to shut off transparency just to be
able to get any work done. :(

Thanks for reading through all of this :)

Rene