Francis Woodhouse - Down With Numbers » Xgl + Compiz = Fancy effects

Xgl + Compiz = Fancy effects

February 14th, 2006 in Archive

Those who keep an eye on Linux will no doubt have heard of Xgl and Compiz, the two things that herald the coming of an era in which Linux doesn’t look rubbish.

I spent some time hacking around with compiz’s plugin system, and managed to create a working plugin which allows you to change the active window’s opacity by using ctrl+shift+mousewheel. You can get the plugin and source and read the code walkthrough I wrote.

(If you try the plugin and it alters the window’s saturation rather than opacity, your version of Compiz is too old - compile a new version from CVS.)

Don’t forget to digg this story!

Update: Mike “PsyberOne” Sylvester provided me with a simple patch for Makefile.am should you wish/need to compile it with Compiz yourself. This is now in the archive.

31 Responses to 'Xgl + Compiz = Fancy effects'

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rasta said,

on February 15th, 2006 at 12:40 am

Great plugin! Thanks a lot!
belgabor said,

on February 15th, 2006 at 1:39 am

Works great! Please consider submitting it to the xorg mailing list to get it into compiz cvs if you haven’t already done so.
John S. Rhodes said,

on February 15th, 2006 at 6:23 pm

“Xgl + Compiz = Fancy effects”

Whazz this look like? What makes it fancy? Would love to see it…
Francis said,

on February 15th, 2006 at 6:27 pm

There’re videos of it in action on the Novell site: http://www.novell.com/linux/xglrelease/
zasf said,

on February 16th, 2006 at 9:23 am

just a quick note to let you know that your plugin has been blogged also on ossblog.it (see http://www.ossblog.it/post/522/scrivere-plugin-per-xgl-e-compiz). Ciao, Matteo
Andrew said,

on February 20th, 2006 at 11:10 am

Thanks! I have it working fine on x86_64.

I just knew that plugins would be springing up for this baby very rapidly.

I think the switcher plugin needs some window title text. HINT HINT ;)

I’ve made a patch myself for switcher that enables reverse alt-tabbing (ie alt-shift-tab). So I hope that feature gets added at some point.
Colin said,

on February 22nd, 2006 at 9:57 pm

Looks like both those suggestions are now in compiz’s CVS Andrew :)

If anyones listening, I’d love to see a “focus follows mouse” plugin with options for “auto raise delay” and perhaps auto setting of alpha of the windows over the top of the focus (but non-raised) window. May take a look at that if I find time.
Belgabor said,

on February 23rd, 2006 at 3:09 am

@Colin: See apps->compiz->general->allscreens->options in gconf-editor. You can set focus behaviour there (not alpha though).
Stefan said,

on February 25th, 2006 at 2:06 pm

This is quite a nice plugin!
BTW: Your patch is not working anymore if applied against the newest cvs and neither do the precompiled binaries work. Had to change some line numbers…
Stefan said,

on February 25th, 2006 at 2:31 pm

Ok, seems like I was wrong :)
I applied it in the wrong directory…
However, the binaries produce a segmentation fault with current cvs, so you might want to update your package.
Jos Dehaes said,

on February 27th, 2006 at 1:12 pm

Hi,

nice plugin, and since 100% opaque windows give glitches on my hardware, I use it a lot. Considering this problem, why not add a default opacity to the configuration settings, so that all new windows get that opacity. We could then set that value to 0.99, and this eliminates the need to set it explicitely on all windows.
Andrew said,

on February 27th, 2006 at 7:48 pm

“Looks like both those suggestions are now in compiz’s CVS Andrew :)”

Cool :) I just browsed the CVS code.

I can’t see anything in there adding the window caption… but it is possible I am a dimwit :)

Isn’t Open Source Great :D
Stefan said,

on February 27th, 2006 at 11:44 pm

I’d like to have that too, maybe for some programms exlusively.
Is that to be done in place.c?
QUASAR said,

on March 7th, 2006 at 11:24 pm

can this be used to set a opacity level to a focused window and another to an unfocused one?
Twey said,

on March 27th, 2006 at 6:19 pm

I think someone missed the launch of KDE… ;-)
Francis said,

on March 27th, 2006 at 11:50 pm

I beg to differ :P
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Xgl + Compiz = Fancy effects

31 Responses to 'Xgl + Compiz = Fancy effects'

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