xcompmgr -- Proposal 2: ARGB-window dropoff shadow

[Yann Droneaud]

Le vendredi 25 septembre 2009 à 11:02 -0400, Joel Feiner a écrit :
> On 09/25/2009 09:54 AM, Yann Droneaud wrote:
> > Le mercredi 23 septembre 2009 à 21:10 +0200, Eeri Kask a écrit :
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> it appears xcompmgr does not decorate windows with ARGB 32-bit
> >> visuals; which at first sight seems probably a preference of
> >> artistic taste than a result of engineering considerations. :-)
> >>
> >
> > If client window want to be transparent, putting a rectangular shadow
> > around / under it is not a desired feature (ex: cairo-clock).
> >
> > The same apply to XShape'd window (ex: xeyes).
> >
> > IMHO, shadows should optional and a window should be able to ask for
> > none through a property.
> >
> > Regards.
> >
> 
> Why not fix the shadow under window issue and then this won't be a 
> problem?  XShape windows, of course, should still have no shadows 
> (unless the shadows can be shaped to the window, but that seems like it 
> would be hard to achieve).
> 

Creating rectangular shadows is a bad things for windows with
non-rectangular content.

And creating a shadow that match the content shape is not trivial (at
least for me :): you should take care of "hole" in the window content
(think of a donut for example: is there a full shadow in the center, or
only on the border ?)

I'm OK for the rectangular shadow by default for all windows only if
there's a EWMH property to disable it, but there's currently none AFAIK.

Regards.

-- 
Yann Droneaud