swaybar unintentional transparency when using hide mode

[mcilrain]

Version: 1.7 OS: Ubuntu 22.04.3 GPU: AMD RX 6800

Problem occurs when using mode hide.

The background of non-selected workspaces is transparent causing the underlying application's image to be seen sometimes making workspace labels hard to read.

[aylurus]

That's not a bug. You can freely configure the workspace colors in swaybar, see its man-page.

[mcilrain]

You thought default colors producing illegible text wasn't a bug.

[aylurus]

Well, it seems to me that the problem here isn't the color of the workspace tiles. There is also background text being cut off by the non-transparent part of the bar. As far as I see, there are two possible solutions:

1. Use a wallpaper which does not interfere with the bar, or adjust your current wallpaper so that its content will not overlap with the bar.
2. Configure your workspace tiles to be non-transparent. (Though this will leave the icon clipped and may still look unclean.)

I think both of these are simple and reasonable solutions, so I don't understand why the default should change. Ultimately, this is a matter of style. But as long as the style can be configured, it doesn't matter so much what its default is.

[mcilrain]

1. Use a wallpaper which does not interfere with the bar, or adjust your current wallpaper so that its content will not overlap with the bar.

I'm not using any wallpaper.

You may have misidentified Github running in a browser as wallpaper.

2. Configure your workspace tiles to be non-transparent. (Though this will leave the icon clipped and may still look unclean.)

You thought default colors producing illegible text wasn't a bug.

i3 doesn't suffer from this bug, what was the rationale for deviating from i3 compatibility in this instance?

[aylurus]

You may have misidentified Github running in a browser as wallpaper.

I see. But in this case, the problem is not with the color, but rather with firefox overlapping with swaybar. Usually, an application's rendering area is limited by the status bar. Does the problem disappear when you change to a non-transparent color? And are you running firefox in fullscreen?

[mcilrain]

I use mode hide which makes it so the bar only appears when I hold the super key.

I might disagree that anything is overlapping the bar, I think if that were the case the transparency would be limited to certain regions rather than certain colors.

[aylurus]

I use mode hide which makes it so the bar only appears when I hold the super key.

Then I don't see a bug here. According to the man page, the bar is drawn on top of the current workspace while unhidden. This matches your screenshot. If you don't like parts of the application overlapping with the bar, your bar must not have transparent components. I can see why transparency seems unreasonable in that case. But hide mode is not the default mode of the bar. Anyway, as stated above, it's a simple design choice you can easily change by yourself.

[mcilrain]

If this is indeed intentional functionality rather than a bug then it's an intentional compatibility breakage with i3.

The very first line of text from Sway's description: "sway is an i3-compatible Wayland compositor"

Unless it can be established how this intentional compatibility breakage makes for a better program I will conclude the "it's not a bug" position to be completely without merit.