On Fri, Jun 27, 2003 at 12:14:29PM +0100, Sam Mason wrote: > It seems to work in my version of X. ION doesn't cooperate too well > with it for some reason. I think it's because it unmap's windows when > they're not on top of the stack. This causes the translucent window > to draw on top of a black window sometimes - rather than the window's > that are beneath it in the stack.
Under TWM, when I raise a window to cover the HelloX window and then raise the HelloX window back to be the topmost, it combines its stuff with: 1) what was in the obscuring window in those areas and 2) its previous contents in other areas, causing the window to darken (only black xterms...) each time you repeat this. And it doesn't respond to moving the window or changing an underlying window's contents. While the "transparent terminal emulator" kludge fills the window on expose with the parent window's background (you don't see through to other windows!), Xrender-windows are not filled with anything so you can make them appear translucent the first time you draw something on them, but the next time you draw with alpha<1 your drawings are combined with your old drawings as there seems to be no way to clean the window area to the background except by: 1) unmapping the window, 2) waiting an arbitrary amount of time for the underlying windows to draw themselves and finally 3) remapping the window. But I could be mistaken... At least I could not find an Xrender function to set window translucency, only the alpha of drawing operations and how "pictures" are combined with the screen. (But what little Xrender documentation I've found is bad.) (Finally, as I'm sure there are people even on this ML who don't question the mostly misplaced anti-X propaganda, I see no reason why X couldn't support proper window translucency or even translucent primitive drawing operations without duplicating them in e.g. Xrender.) -- Tuomo
