Review Request: Support for transparent panel without composition

[Aaron Seigo]

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an early decision was not to hack things into plasma. if someone wants translucent panels and other windows, use composition. it's the only way to do it properly. i have no interest in seeing plasma become a pile of hacks held together with chewing gum and baling wire. i left kicker's code base behind because of that "hey, look what we can do!" mentality that went into that code over the years.

now, this doesn't actually work in all cases (e.g. themes with solid panels), doesn't provide real translucency (e.g. see windows between the panels and the desktop), i can only imagine how this does (or doesn't) work with hiding panels and it pollutes the libplasma API with incomprehensible and very this-hack-specific methods.

i appreciate what you are trying to accomplish, but it's simply not in line with plasma's design principles.

- Aaron


On 2009-03-30 00:54:44, David Nolden wrote:
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> This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
> http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/472/
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> 
> (Updated 2009-03-30 00:54:44)
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> 
> Review request for Plasma.
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> 
> Summary
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> Many people can not, or do not want to use composition. A semi-transparent panel highly increases the appeal of a Desktop, and there currently is only very few plasma themes available that have a nice-looking panel without transparency enabled.
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> All other major linux Desktop-Environments support transparent panels without composition(KDE 3.x, GNOME, and others), and since usually the only thing that needs to be visible through the panel is the Desktop itself, using a composition-less approach does not have much disadvantage here.
> 
> Here's I'm proposing a patch to achieve  this in a relatively clean way: The panel is painted and updated as if it was a plasmoid on the Desktop itself, grabbing the painted area plasma-internally directly from the  underlying desktop-view. The corresponding area of the panel is updated whenever the desktop is repainted, which means that animated plasmoids partially hidden under the panel, animations like the desktop-fading, moving plasmoids partially under the panel, etc. "just work".
> 
> Result: A nice looking panel for everyone, less work for theme designers. Please don't leave those behind who don't want or can not use desktop composition!
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> (Note: If you try this out, it doesn't work with all themes, since some themes seem to have no alpha-information in the non-composition case).
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> 
> Diffs
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>   trink/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/containments/mid-panel/panel.cpp 940781 
>   trink/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/containments/panel/panel.cpp 940781 
>   trink/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/shells/CMakeLists.txt 940781 
>   trink/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/shells/desktop/desktopview.h 940781 
>   trink/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/shells/desktop/desktopview.cpp 940781 
>   trink/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/shells/desktop/panelview.h 940781 
>   trink/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/shells/desktop/panelview.cpp 940781 
>   trink/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/shells/desktop/plasmaapp.h 940781 
>   trink/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/shells/desktop/plasmaapp.cpp 940781 
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> Diff: http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/472/diff
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> 
> Testing
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> Thanks,
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> David
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>