Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?

Re:Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story? by anthk on Saturday December 23, 2023 @05:49AM (#38743222)

But docks work in a different way, such as XRender or just a PNG with an alpha layer. Much less expensive than copying a chunk of the backdrop and then "pasted" at your terminal background.

Often docks will be able to show you the underlying windows behind it, even without compositing. But under the terminal with fake transparency you couldn't see another window behind it, just the backdrop part.

I think X11 had some extensions to allow translucency too for software like oneko, xroach or such.

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Re:Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story? by onli on Saturday December 23, 2023 @08:32AM (#38744113)

From my experience this is wrong. If you set a transparent background in wxwidgets/gtk it will show you a grey background. And gtk3 even removed the ability to query the x background pixmap. So if there is better support for this at an X level, this is not available above.

See https://github.com/onli/simdock/issues/11, and if there really are good alternative solutions I'd be happy for some help.

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Re:Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story? by anthk on Saturday December 23, 2023 @02:15PM (#38747148)

Ah, too bad then. So, lots of stuff got deprecated, I didn't notice that until right now.

Still, there was another tech not querying the background pixmaps, but used from old X11 software to do non-rectangular windows. Oclock, maybe.

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Re:Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story? by stavros on Saturday December 23, 2023 @05:54AM (#38743245)

Why is it less expensive? Sounds like the exact same operation, except the OS is doing it.

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Re:Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story? by anthk on Saturday December 23, 2023 @08:11AM (#38744012)

No. XRender worked in a different way than ATerm/Eterm.

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