Not too long ago this screen shot used to appear on the xmonad homepage: http://xmonad.org/images/xmonad_xcompmgr.png It was on the strength of the image that I started to play with xmonad. I now have xmonad working and have even enabled a few extensions. But for the life of me I cannot find any description of how to achieve the shadow effect. Can anyone help? TIA, /john
john:
Not too long ago this screen shot used to appear on the xmonad homepage:
http://xmonad.org/images/xmonad_xcompmgr.png
It was on the strength of the image that I started to play with xmonad. I now have xmonad working and have even enabled a few extensions. But for the life of me I cannot find any description of how to achieve the shadow effect. Can anyone help?
That's using the xcompmgr application, as described here: http://xmonad.org/contrib.html#xcompmgr well, not really described. Look up xcompmgr's man page, e.g. http://packages.debian.org/experimental/x11/xcompmgr I'm glad you liked that screenshot too! -- Don
On Thu, 1 Nov 2007 21:45:39 -0700, you wrote:
john:
Not too long ago this screen shot used to appear on the xmonad homepage:
http://xmonad.org/images/xmonad_xcompmgr.png
It was on the strength of the image that I started to play with xmonad. I now have xmonad working and have even enabled a few extensions. But for the life of me I cannot find any description of how to achieve the shadow effect. Can anyone help?
That's using the xcompmgr application, as described here:
http://xmonad.org/contrib.html#xcompmgr
well, not really described. Look up xcompmgr's man page, e.g.
http://packages.debian.org/experimental/x11/xcompmgr
I'm glad you liked that screenshot too!
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? TIA, /john
On Sat, Nov 03, 2007 at 12:05:59AM -0500, John S. Yates, Jr. wrote:
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? Unfortunately (AIUI) not yet (except in the compiz wm). Soon, though, soon...
On Sat, 3 Nov 2007 13:29:00 -0400
Devin Mullins
On Sat, Nov 03, 2007 at 12:05:59AM -0500, John S. Yates, Jr. wrote:
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? Unfortunately (AIUI) not yet (except in the compiz wm). Soon, though, soon...
Xmonad mailing list Xmonad@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/xmonad
On Nov 3, 2007, at 20:53 , Andrea Spada wrote:
Well, this is a very interesting topic. I always wanted a solution to not only make my unfocused windows transparent (by a customizable amount), but implementing much advanced compositing functions, to a definable class of windows, as:
sjanssen & co. are looking into xmonad hooks to allow you to do things like that, as long as compositing in a library so you don't need to use e.g. compiz. -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH
allbery:
On Nov 3, 2007, at 20:53 , Andrea Spada wrote:
Well, this is a very interesting topic. I always wanted a solution to not only make my unfocused windows transparent (by a customizable amount), but implementing much advanced compositing functions, to a definable class of windows, as:
sjanssen & co. are looking into xmonad hooks to allow you to do things like that, as long as compositing in a library so you don't need to use e.g. compiz.
yes, in particular Eric Mertens and I are investigating how to add pluggable compositing code to xmonad, via extensions. We think there's great potential here. -- Don
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 _______________________________________________ Xmonad mailing list Xmonad@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/xmonad
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
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
On Saturday 03 November 2007 15:27:00 Yair Mahalalel 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.
We could actually provide the functionality of transset-df and focustrans.pl within xmonad with a layout modifier. All it requires is setting a window property on unfocused windows. Who wants to write it? ;)
(And since this is my first posting on this list, kudos to the xmonad team. It's an outstanding piece of work)
Thanks!
Cheers, Yair.
participants (7)
-
Andrea Spada -
Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH -
Devin Mullins -
Don Stewart -
John S. Yates, Jr. -
Spencer Janssen -
Yair Mahalalel