This is something i realy miss in todays wm's. A option to make all inactive windows in the current workspace semi-transparent and the active one opaqe. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Tnx a million for the great software you guys produce :)
Created attachment 156 Patch that does what you want. This patch will make windows semi-translucent like you want. I doubt that this will ever get applied to the official source... It actually makes things a bit unusable. Anyways, have fun.
Oops. I just realized that patch is combined with my fix to "Satan's bug," 666. http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666
Created attachment 199 does this but with fading in and out of transparency with focus
Created attachment 621 Makes inactive windows less opaque (respects _NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY) (depends on attachment 620 for bug 1958)
Created attachment 626 Makes inactive windows less opaque (respects _NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY) As before, depends on attachment 620 for bug 1958.
Created attachment 627 Makes the opacity configurable via the settings manager.
Created attachment 628 Also make the window frames less opaque.
Darren, your patches break the various transparency settings somehow. Now it's either all opaque or slightly transparent, but there is not the incremental effect that was before. BTW, I'm not really sure about that feature request, it puts too much window manager's logic into the compositor. Until now, I tried to keep the compositor separate from the thw WM logic (as much as possible).
Hmm. Looks fine here, except for the shadow rendering (which I forgot about). As for the logic, that could be shifted into events.c and/or client.c as needed, I suppose. This would add at least applied_opacity somewhere, probably CWindow (need to look at this). (The disabled part of the calculate_opacity() should be dropped completely.) Ideally, I'd have (something like) windows which are transients for the focus window and the window for which the focus window is a transient being rendered with normal opacity rather than inactive opacity.
Created attachment 629 Makes inactive windows less opaque (respects _NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY) Changes: fixes problem with shadows; includes the frame translucency patch.
Created attachment 630 Makes the opacity configurable via the settings manager. Changes: fix an erroneous reference to frame_opacity.
Created attachment 633 Makes inactive windows less opaque (respects hints); adds config option. Significant rework (& combined patch). The logic has been moved into client.c, and I've adjusted which windows are marked as active - currently, any which is modal, transient-for or the transient-for target of the focussed window.
Ok, applied with indent and code style cleanup (basically indentation of 2 chars changed to 4, C++ style comments removed)
This is possible with v4.4. Closing this bug...