[clfswm-devel] Transparent background for empty frames

[Philippe Brochard]

Ales Guzik writes:

> Hi,
>
> On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 1:54 AM, Philippe Brochard
> <pbrochard at common-lisp.net> wrote:
>> Ales Guzik writes:
>>
>>> Hi.
>>>
>> Hi,
>>
>>> Is there any way to make frames without windows draw transparent
>>> background instead of black?
>>>
>> I have added transparency support for all frames, menu... backgrounds.
>> It is enabled by default but can be turn off with the
>> *transparent-background* variable.
>>
>
>> Please, can you test commit 7873a020b3. It works for me with clisp,
>> cmucl and sbcl.
>>
>
> It works, but works wrong with my setup.
> Now it remembers desktop image at startup time and draws it as
> background.
>
Indeed, it's exactly what it is supposed to do. In fact, we can only do
pseudo-transparency like the one in Eterm. We can't have full
transparency expect if we rewrite CLFSWM as a compositing window
manager [1]. Or maybe if we can use [2]. 

> But conky draws current time and uptime on my root window every second and
> this changes are not represented in frame backgrounds.
>
This one is very difficult to solve. For example, try conky under icewm
with an Eterm and a transparent background set with Esetroot. The conky
window is not shown in the Eterm background.
Maybe I can hack something to import the conky window content under the
frame background. But I don't know if this will work and I'll don't
integrate this hack if it'll be too ugly.

> Additionally my wallpaper
> randomly changes every 10 minutes by script, but clfswm draws picture
> it remembered at startup time.
>
Yes, CLFSWM loads the background content under a pixmap and then use this
pixmap as the frame background. Currently it is not updated at all. Just
taken at startup.
I'll look to use the Esetroot/Eterm method which allow to change the
background dynamically. 

[...]

Cheers,

Philippe

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xfwm
[2] http://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/doc/compositeproto/compositeproto.txt