Re: How do people make the semi-transparent windows?

[Michael Torrie <torriem chem byu edu>]

On Sun, 2004-02-22 at 14:08, Jack Chen wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Can anyone tell me how people make those windows semi-transparent? Is
> it done in gtk or in the specific window manager?

Until the compositing extensions are defined and available in X11, there
is no real way to make windows semi-transparent.  

The semi-transparent windows and effects you have seen under X11 to this
date (on XFree86 anyway) are horrible hacks that look bad and don't work
well.  Essentially what you would do is take a picture of what's
underneath your window, and then make your window have the same picture,
only blended with your window's contents.  As you can see this is a
terrible way to do transparency as it cannot reflect any animation or
things underneath your window.  In many cases, all you get is a
semitransparent view of the root window.

See http://www.freedesktop.org to see how the new true transparency
technologies are coming along.  What's being developed are mechanism for
doing true transparency (that can be controlled at the widget or window
manager level) and allows all sorts of OS X -style effects to happen. 

Michael


> 
> Thanks in advance for your answer.
> 
> Jack
> 
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-- 
Michael Torrie <torriem chem byu edu>