Taskbar transparency

[takiz]

Hi. How to make taskbar's background transparent?

[gijsbers]

Change the taskbarbg.xpm to be transparent.

[takiz]

theme_name/taskbar/taskbarbg.xpm transparent:

/* XPM */ 
static const unsigned char * pic_xpm[] = {
"1 5 1 1",
"  c None",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" "};

Doesn't work with any icewm-theme — only black color instead of the transparency.
At that time, transparency in the other windows (e.g. conky) works fine.

[bbidulock]

I think you need to run a composite manager to turn the black into transparent.

[gijsbers]

Looked into this and it turns out not so easy as the background is set and copying of pixmaps ignores transparency. This technique isn't applied by Ice. Even if it was then it still is tricky to setup. So no it can't.

[frankzen]

I am wondering what technique tint2 (taskbar replacement) uses to implement transparency. On my machine (no composite manager) I have a transparent taskbar under IceWm drawn by tint2.

[gijsbers]

@takiz Is this issue still of interest to you? It is possible to do in the 1.6.1 release if you set Alpha=1 and use the following taskbar/taskbarbg.xpm:

/* XPM */
static char * taskbarbg_xpm[] = {
"1 26 1 1",
"       c None",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" ",
" "};

[gijsbers]

This feature is used beautifully by the Alette-Icewm theme.

[gijsbers]

Theme JustIce_MD also has interesting effects.

[gijsbers]

• aluminium