On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 6:18 AM, Jud Craft <craft...@gmail.com> wrote:
PS.  Is it impossible to draw a transparent (by color-key, I guess)
window in X?  If so, there might could just be a tooltip canvas that
sits on top of everything.  I admit these are very desperate and
probably impractical ideas.  Plasma may not even like the idea of
having more than one big screen canvas at a time.

There are two ways to make transparent X windows:

1) Window shapes, and
2) An alpha channel.

Window shapes works without compositing but it only allows either fully opaque 
or fully transparent pixels and is slightly laggy for animations (As you need 
to do a full X round-trip to change it). The alpha channel on the other hand 
allows for translucent pixels and is not laggy as everything is done by the 
client, it requires compositing to be enabled to work though.

The only way to do what you are suggesting with any good results is to use an 
alpha channel, but doing that requires compositing and defeats the goal as then 
you can just use a KWin effect to animate the window in its entirety 
(Communicating with KWin to do custom animations is easy, I've been talking 
with the author of Yakuake about doing a slide effect for its main window. 
Maybe that effect could be useful for Plasma?).

Speaking of Yakuake it currently uses window shape animations, if you want to 
see how that looks check it out.

--

Lucas Murray :: http://www.undefinedfire.com
GPG Fingerprint: 0B88 499E 3F5B 1405 D952  258A AD90 B4F5 90B6 3534

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

_______________________________________________
Plasma-devel mailing list
Plasma-devel@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel

Reply via email to