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