Jeremy was playing around on ShinyCat trying to get Compiz installed for some nifty orange glows around his windows. Well, ShinyCat has crappy integrated ATI drivers and we couldn’t get any of the drivers properly installed so Compiz kept giving stupid errors. He was kind of bothered that we couldn’t get this to work, so jokingly I said “The xfce compositor does shadows, just change the color in the source code.”
That joke turned into the project for the next ten minutes which included hunting down the XFCE Window Manager source code and finding where in said code the color for the shadow was defined. Jeremy now has orange “glows” around his windows and pop up menus without the bloat and resource eating that Compiz would bring to ShinyCat.
It was fun.
On the todo list for the window manager is “selectable shadow colors.” I’m pretty sure I could patch it so that it accepts arguments from the command line for colors, but I wouldn’t quite know how to bring it into the GUI (though maybe I should attempt that over break? If it’s still on the todo list (which is only a couple of months old?), that possibly means that someone hasn’t submitted a patch to implement such a thing yet?).
The changelog for the latest 4.6 beta (current stable release is 4.4.3) says that they’ve implemented changing the opacity value but not color yet. =P
Before (on white):
After (on black):
> Jeremy now has orange “glows”
Please post a screen shot of the Orange “glows”
The only one I can get to at the moment is on facebook and it’s ugly because it was scaled poorly, and the compiled binary is giving me a weird error on my machine.. I’ll ask Jeremy for a screenshot when he comes to
OK, got it to compile on my machine, some paths were different for some reason. Posted a black shadow on white background vs. the orange shadow on black background. Post updated accordingly.
The shadows look different depending on what’s behind them in the background. I’ve noticed that my black shadows look.. deeper? when there’s darker stuff behind them than when there’s not. The solid white and black backgrounds should still give a general idea of what’s going on here. Besides, you don’t really want an overpowering orange glow glow, but more of a subtle orange shadow effect. An accent, if you will.