[Xmonad] compositing

[Yair Mahalalel]

Hi John,

I attached my copy of focustrans.pl below. I run it with the application
list set to '.' and after running

xcompmgr -cCfF -r10 -o1 -I0.01 -O0.1 -D5 &

The version below runs slowly and badly, but manages to survive for a
few hours before failing. It contains a dependency on X11::Protocol
since I replaced some the calls to external utilities with direct calls
to the server, after parsing the output of those utils didn't work.

Setting the transparency is a single command as well, and should be
quite simple, but I have some integer format conversion problems, so it
still relies settrans-df. I didn't push the matter too hard and just
played with it to understand the X side of things before trying to redo
it as an XMonad extension, but perhaps you'll get it to work. Finding a
top level window list is another problem of the script - its list is far
too long.

If you want to continue discussing this script please reply offline as
I think we wandered quite off the list topic.

Cheers,
Yair.

On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 11:40:05PM -0500, John S. Yates, Jr. wrote:
> On Sat, 3 Nov 2007 22:27:00 +0200, Yair wrote:
> 
> >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.
> 
> Yair,
> 
> Google returns a single hit.  The page is in Japanese:
> 
>   http://www010.upp.so-net.ne.jp/atsushi/howto/transparent/index.html
> 
> 
> It dies link to the following perl script:
> 
>   http://www010.upp.so-net.ne.jp/atsushi/howto/transparent/focustrans.pl
> 
> 
> I have created /usr/local/share/focustrans.apps then start up as follows:
> 
>   #!/bin/sh
>   xcompmgr &
>   focustrans.pl /usr/local/share/focustrans.apps &
>   xmonad
> 
> 
> This starts xmonad as before but has no other effect.  I have minimal
> extensions configured.
> 
> Your note suggests that you got this working.  So am I doing something
> obviously wrong?
> 
> /john
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