Re: visual selection of an area of the root window

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sat, May 03, 2003 at 01:11:16PM -0700, Lars Damerow wrote:
> I'm writing a GTK-based screen recording application. It needs to have a
> facility for allowing the user to make a rubber-band selection of an area of
> the root window.
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions for a clean way to do this? I imagine it'd
> involve making a transparent window with no decorations to cover the root
> window while the user selects an area.

There are two basic approaches:

 - use a shaped window; in metacity, there's code in tabpopup.c
   showing how to do an "outline" shaped window

 - grab the X server and draw/undraw with IncludeInferiors using XOR

Neither one is really that nice, though.

Havoc