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fromminttoarch

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2015-10-25

Posts: 14

conky with semi-transparent background but not-transparent text?

Hi everybody,

I'm strugging to realize the conky setup that I'd like to have. Is possible for conky to have a colored background that is semi-transparent (with an alpha value of, say, 0.5) and that has the text, bars, and images not transparent?

I use

own_window = true,
own_window_type = 'desktop',
own_window_transparent = false, -- switch for /complete/ transparency; if false use own_window_colour
own_window_colour = '555555',
own_window_argb_visual = false, -- switch for gradual transparency; set with own_window_argb_value
--own_window_argb_value = 127, -- has an effect only of own_window_argb_visual = true; value between 0 (=transparent) to 255 (=not transparent)

and tried all combinations for own_window_transparent and own_window_arb_visual, but I can only achieve full transparency (which doesn't work well with my desktop background), no transparency (which is a bit heavy), or a semi-transparent colored background with semi-transparent text, bars, and images (which, due to this transparency, have different apparent colors depending on the desktop background image).

Did I miss something? None of similar posts regarding conky transparency seems to fit here and I can't find anything in the conky manual. I'm starting to think that what I want to do isn't possible with conky.

Thanks for any help!

fromminttoarch

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2015-10-25

Posts: 14

Re: conky with semi-transparent background but not-transparent text?

Turns out there is a recently added option for conky, draw_blended, which defaults to True and impacts the alpha value of images. With 'draw blended = False' the alpha value of the image is correct. But when conky has a colored background and the image doesn't fill its own bounding box (that is, parts of the image are transparent), the image is represented in conky as is. Meaning that the colored background is not layered behind the image. Image transparency 'goes through' the colored background all the way to the desktop image, leaving a 'gap' in the colored background of conky. Also, the order of conky options seems to have an effect.

So I'm one step further with conky but still not where I want to be.