Re: observe root window

[Andreas Volz <andreas brachttal net>]

Am Sat, 14 Jun 2003 17:24:41 -0300 schrieb Leandro A. F. Pereira:

> Quoted by a town of ninja mummies
> For `Andreas Volz <andreas brachttal net>' 
> On Saturday, 14 June 2003 (22:00):
>
> > I want to write a gtk2 application that observes the root window of
> > my desktop and do something if I click with a mouse button on the
> > root window.
>
>
>       ROX-Filer and Nautilus creates their own big window and sets
>       some hints so they
> are ignored by the Window Manager. It's easier to receive
> button_pressed events this way.

Oh yes, this is a good idea. I tried to do this, but I've still some
problems. First I created a new winfow on desktop layer and painted a
big background image in it. Now I attatched some menus and other stuff.
I looks good, but if I use an application like gnome-terminal or
gnome-panel with a transparent background, these applications show
the"real" root-window in the "transparent" background.

So I had som ideas. First I tried to create a fully shaped window to
display the background. Now I could paint some icons and other stuff on
the background. Unlikely I'm not able to get mouse actions from the
shaped area :-(

Then I thought it must be posible to copy the image from the root window
into my application and then paint some icons on it and display menus.
But how could I get the image from the root window?

Or is there a better way? I think perhaps it's possible to create a
window with a transparent background without shapes (Like
gnome-terminal or gnome-panel)

thanks
Andreas