Re: true transparency

[Ian McKellar <yakk-gnome-list yakk net au>]

On Tue, Jun 15, 1999 at 09:49:58AM -0500, Jamin Philip Gray wrote:
> 
> Would it be possible to make the gnome-terminal or Eterm or any
> program, really, transparent in the true sense of the word--to be
> able to see exactly what is behind it, not just the background
> image.  For example, you'd see your gmc icons on your desktop
> behind it, or an xscreensaver running on the root display, or
> something, and you'd see windows that are behind it.  Is that
> possible?

Yes, but probably undesirable. You can use X Shape Extensions to make a window
any shape (see 'blast' or 'oclock' as examples). One of the features of X
Shape Extensions is that the focus passes to the window behind where there
is a hole. If you made the shape of an terminal be its text, then to actually
be able to type you'd have to have the hotspot of your cursor over a pixel in
the font you're using :)

The other problem is that X servers aren't designed for doing this (who know
what will happen now that raster is an XFree86 developer though). My personal
favourite use of X Shape Extensions is the `wm2' window manager - simple and
elegant and makes graduitous use of shape extensions.

As an aside I believe that GDK (and hence GTK and GNOME) has Shape support,
so it shouldn't be _too_ hard to add support to gnome-terminal.

Ian (who is avoiding studying for exams)