transparency doesn't work

[Adam Spiers]

Screenkey is awesome, but has one serious deficiency: the popup window is not transparent, despite the code including a "set_opacity(0.7)". Maybe this works for some desktop environments, but not for mine (XFCE4 + Openbox + xcompmgr), and anyway it looks like a standard method for implementing transparency in PyGTK should require much more than a single line of extra code, e.g.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10782527/pygtk-transparent-window

[Adam Spiers (adam.spiers)]

I have placed a bounty on this: https://www.bountysource.com/#issues/128461-transparency-doesn-t-work

[Mike Kazantsev (mk-fraggod)]

Hey Adam,

Can you try if fix from the linked branch above (lp:~mk-fraggod/screenkey/screenkey) works for you?

As you have compositing wm, it should work, but there's also an option for non-compositing wm's, which would require a bit more work (drawing text shapes on cairo surface and then using it as shape mask with "w.shape_combine_mask()"), but since X works fairly well with compositing these days, not sure if it's worth the trouble.

[Adam Spiers (adam.spiers)]

Works great, many thanks! I hope it can be merged into the trunk. Would be nice if the opacity level was configurable in the settings rather than hardcoded to 0.7, I'm guessing that's pretty easy to do too?

[Mike Kazantsev (mk-fraggod)]

Yes, should be fairly trivial indeed, though not sure if it's worth creating whole config file just for that one parameter - maybe commandline option (e.g. "screenkey --opacity=0.5") would be a better match?

Another way would be to just make more stuff - like colors - configurable, but it shouldn't be necessary, given that these can be setup through gtkrc.

[Mike Kazantsev (mk-fraggod)]

Ah, right, managed to miss the systray and preferences dialog that's already there - will add the setting to it.

[Mike Kazantsev (mk-fraggod)]

Just pushed r54 to lp:~mk-fraggod/screenkey/screenkey with "Opacity" box in preferences.
Should be pickled between runs, same as with other options as well.

[Adam Spiers (adam.spiers)]

Awesome work, thanks a lot guys!!