[Xmonad] compositing

[Yair Mahalalel]

On Sat, Nov 03, 2007 at 12:05:59AM -0500, John S. Yates, Jr. wrote:
> 
> Thanks Don.  I now have drop shadows.
> 
> Unfortunately they appear on every window.  Originally I did not inspect the referenced screenshot carefully enough and so got the mistaken impression
> that this effect would be dynamic.   That is I expected that only the window with the focus would have a shadow.  In a tiled setting this would cause
> the window losing focus to appear to drop back to the tiled plane and the window receiving focus appear to pop up.
> 
> Is such an effect possible?  Has anyone done so?  Any advice or pointers?

This is not what you were asking for, but you can achieve a similar
effect by controlling the transparency of the windows. There's a perl
script floating around called focustrans.pl, which uses the transset-df
utility to keep all windows but the one in focus translucent. If you set
your root image to something bland, this has the effect of toning down
the whole screen except for focused window, which appears to stand out.
I find this to be a very intuitive way to keep track of window focus.

The script itself is an ugly hack, however, and might take some fiddling
to get working, but it might be worth the effort as the effect is both
pretty and usable.

(And since this is my first posting on this list, kudos to the xmonad
team. It's an outstanding piece of work)

Cheers,
Yair.

> TIA,
> 
> /john
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