Subject: FVWM: semi-transparent windows

From: Tigran Aivazian <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 1998 14:30:07 +0100 (BST)

Hello,

I heard some rumours that some "alien" (i.e. non-fvwm2) window managers are
advancing and producing new interesting features. I always assumed that
fvwm2(.0.46) contains all possible features one can ever dream of in the
mighty X Window System. Now someone tells me that Enlightment is capable of
producing "semi-transparent" windows whereby you can see what is happening
on the background xterm while having focus on a foreground one. That's a
neat feature and I hope fvwm2 does support it.

So, the question is - what do I tweak in my ~/.fvwm2rc to make it work?

My .fvwm2rc is attached, btw if anyone is curious - it's got lots of nice
shortcuts.

Regards,
------ -------- --------- -------- --  - -- ---- --
Tigran A. Aivazian           | http://www.sco.com
Escalations Research Group   | tel: +44-(0)1923-813796
Santa Cruz Operation Ltd     | Email: [email-masked]

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 1998 18:09:14 +0100 (GMT)

> My .fvwm2rc is attached, btw if anyone is curious - it's got lots of nice

As I understood it, it wasn't quite that clever - simply that if you
set up the root window with Esetroot and used ETerms, the background to
the ETerm was the region of the root window image the Eterm was over.
This gives 'transparency to the root window' but not to any other
underlapping window contents. I assume this is done by Esetroot setting
an environmental variable to the root window image and the ETerms,
which are said to be rxvt derived picking it up and using their own
coordinates to window the relevant part. I also gather that the effect
fails if you change the root window image which tends to support it
being something like this.
It may be the case that the interaction is purely between ETerm and
ESetroot, in which case, the fvwm2 setup is irrelevant.

Fun, certainly, but not as useful as anything approaching true
transparency could be. 

Kim

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From: Toy Keeper <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 1998 11:17:54 -0600

> neat feature and I hope fvwm2 does support it.

Well...

The bad news is that Fvwm does not support this.  The other bad news is
that Enlightenment doesn't either.

However, a program called "Eterm" does, sort of.  It is the
Enlightenment version of XTerm, and can only be translucent (so far)
with respect to the root window.  And...  it's very slow.

To do it, you'll need Eterm, which requires a bunch of other libraries;
and the Esetroot program which comes with Eterm.  If you set the
background with Esetroot, you can then start up Eterm with the "--trans"
and/or "--shade" or "--tint" options, to get a shaded, translucent
terminal.

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From: Richard Lister <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 1998 14:26:33 -0400

On Thu, 24 Sep 1998 11:17:54 -0600
Toy Keeper <[email-masked]> 
wrote concerning 'Re: FVWM: semi-transparent windows':
> > mighty X Window System. 

Er ... wishful thinking? 

> that Enlightenment doesn't either.

Because it's really not a window manager issue, but an application
issue.

> and/or "--shade" or "--tint" options, to get a shaded, translucent

True transparency would be very difficult to achieve. You can see a program
with a transparent window at

  http://www.df.uba.ar/~miquel/xtail/index.html

and observe the performance hit compared to an opaque window. Even then
it is a static transparency, that doesn't update with a window beneath it.

Ric

Richard J Lister, Georgetown Institute for Cognitive and Computational Sciences
Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC 20007, USA
Phone: +1 202-687 2878
Email: [email-masked] 
Web: http://www.giccs.georgetown.edu/~ric/
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From: "Mr. Duck" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 1998 14:06:03 -0500 (CDT)

> with a transparent window at

<ObDisclaimer>I know very little about X programming...</ObDisclaimer>

As I understand it, in order to achieve True Transparency in a terminal
program, each individual letter displayed in the terminal would need to be
its own shaped window.  This would not only (I assume) be a programming
nightmare, but would also make Eterm's current transparency seem like a
speed demon..

The coding of this is left as an exercise to the reader.. ;)

--chris.

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From: Pat Rogan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 1998 16:57:26 -0400

I use Eterm and fvwm2 and i can attest that they do work well together. 
If you want i'll put up a screen shot on my web page, but you can also
use your imagination. :)

I also figured out ways to make all of it look better on 8-bit displays
(fvwm included). If anyone's interested, email me.

Wait for future versions of the E stuff for real transparency.  But
_real_ transparency may not work without the Enlightenment window
manager taking care of all the details. :( 

** The pseudo transparency would work great if FVWM2 had a
"StaysOnBottom" command...

~p@
-- 

Patrick Rogan
-----------------------------------
Systems Engineer

Lycos, Inc.
1 Oxford Centre
301 Grant Street, Suite 525
Pittsburgh, PA   15219-1408
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From: Tigran Aivazian <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 1998 11:19:01 +0100 (BST)

Nothing of the kind. I don't know (and don't care) if the way it achieves
the transparency is by treating each character as a window or anything
else. It works fine, stable, extremely fast and only has 3.2M of memory
image (some of it is shared).

On the other hand, I, of course, would laugh at anyone using anything
slower than a dual PII/450 with 128M ram and at least 8M video card as a 
"decent X workstation". It is, imho, the minimum useable configuration and I am
quite happy with it. In fact, even that config is not fast enough so I
offload a dozen or so netscape's (different versions) to run on small PII
machines on the network (3 in total).

regards,

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From: Andy Mortimer <[email-masked]>
Date: 25 Sep 1998 13:36:45 +0100

> "StaysOnBottom" command...

I actually have a patch for this, which I use for keeping xloads below
my icons so I can see what's happening on lots of machines. It's very
horrid and inefficient code, but it works, and I don't have time to
improve it at the moment.

If anyone wants a copy, let me know and I'll try to extract the patch
for this from my CVS tree containing a few hacks that I decided I
needed. It's against 2.0.46.

Andy

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From: Charles Riley <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 1998 10:31:45 -0500

> > advancing and producing new interesting features. I always assumed that

<SNIP>
 
> Fun, certainly, but not as useful as anything approaching true

	Think about that for a minute - would you really want true
transparency?  It seems to me that being able to see the output of even
two or three windows which happened to be stacked would be messy at
best.  Certainly E could use some polishing up but I think that they
have implemented pseudo transparency pretty well.  Just my $.02
			Charles
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From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 1998 18:23:42 +0100 (GMT)

> have implemented pseudo transparency pretty well.  Just my $.02

I tend to use a mixture of text and 'graphical' apps together and whilst
text over text (particularly if the text is the same colour) probably
becomes a mess rapidly the same is not necessarily true if the
underlying app is heavily 'guified' (or particularly where one of the
apps is a graphics program). 

Many of the applications where it could be useful, having thought about
it could probably be done better with explicit interactive control of
window stacking 'levels' (and having the focus separated from it so
one can edit an underlying window without it coming to the front).
(This would probably be necessary to make good use of transparency
anyway). 
How one would implement a multi level window stack like this and
particularly how to control it efficiently I don't know, just 'up one'
'down one' 'send to back' and 'bring to front' would not likely
be sufficient.

Cheers

Kim