when i set popup windows to be partially transparent, it works great, but when xscreensaver kicks on, I can see through it to my desktop. It would be nice if I could input a list of programs that are exceptions to transparency settings. (like movie players, screensavers etc).
Enable "Display full screen overlay windows directly" in the WM tweaks. Popup windows are "override redirects", and don't have "type" so it's not possible to distinguish a tooltip, a menu or a fullscreen window mapped to hide what's behind...
(In reply to comment #1) > Enable "Display full screen overlay windows directly" in the WM tweaks. > > Popup windows are "override redirects", and don't have "type" so it's not > possible to distinguish a tooltip, a menu or a fullscreen window mapped to hide > what's behind... > That didn't work. I think its related to my X setup though. Right now I have a dual headed nvidia card set up using twinview to drive two monitors. When I reconfigure to use a single monitor, That option works great. Let me know if you need a copy of my xorg.conf or anything else.
But, again, this is not a bug, so there is not much I can do... The window Xscreensaver use to "hide" the other windows is of the same type as pop-ups (ie an "override redirect" window, in X terminology). Therefore, if you change the opacity of pop-up windows in xfwm4 WM tweaks, then the Xscreensaver window will also be transparent. Xfwm4 can optionally work around that problem by "un-redirecting" fullscreen override redirect windows, unfortunately you are using a Xinerama layout that prevents xscreensaver from mapping a window as large as the logical display, so this option has no effect on your setup. This is not a bug with X, nor xcreensaver, and there is nothing that can be done in xorg.conf to work around that. The maintainer of gxine as proposed an extension to the EWMH standard that locks opacity on windows that set a specific property (clearly because a fullscreen window mapped by a video player suffer the same problem as you describe with Xscreensaver). This extension uses the NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY_LOCKED property, and xfwm4 implements this (Darren Salt, who maintains gxine, has provided a patch for xfwm4 that is applied in 4.4), but I'm not sure anyone else uses that beside gxine itself. So in a nutshell, this is not a bug with xfwm4, sorry.
(In reply to comment #3) > So in a nutshell, this is not a bug with xfwm4, sorry. maybe i should have done this as a "feature request" or something > But, again, this is not a bug, so there is not much I can do... The window > Xscreensaver use to "hide" the other windows is of the same type as pop-ups I have come up with some code that prevents xfwm from changing the opacity of the screeensaver window. I also came up with some code that will avoid changing the opacity of a window, based on the name of the executable that spawned it. I think it would be a simple matter to have a list of programs (set by the user) that should not have their opacities changed. let me know if you are interested in any of this.
Hehehe, thanks for the offer, but I'd really prefer the application to set some hint of some sort, I'm really not in favor of changing the behavior of the WM based on which application is running...