Re: again about "Alpha backgrounds"

[Philip Langdale <philipl overt org>]

Andrea Vettorello wrote:
> 
> When you say gnome-terminal transparency you don't mean the
> "transparent background" option under Profile -> Effects, right?
> 
> If i use xcompmgr i've the same result with Metacity or Sawfish, the
> trasparent background is done as the usual root window background
> clipping, and changing opacity/transparency with transset in both WMs
> affects windows and frames (you mention true transparency on the wiki
> so i'm doing something wrong).

You need to start xcompmgr before you start *any* gnome-terminals. It
can't switch between fake and real transparency on the fly. Once you
do that, it will do real transparency and you'll see the problem.

> I was wondering, would the patch still be necessary if instead of GDK
> was used XRenderComposite to render a window frame?
> 
> I would love to add compositing support to Sawfish, but every time i
> look at the code i find something new that i didn't considered before
> with the result of running away scared and shocked.

Yeah - if you switched to XRenderComposite, I'm sure it would work. It's
also probably overkill to do it that way. I'm sure there are simpler
mechanisms that don't clobber the alpha channel. You could, for example,
probably use full gdk-pixbuf instead of the stripped down one that sawfish
uses - or gdk cairo surfaces.

--phil