Ability to use solid color to flash instead of transparency

[synaptiko]

This is not exactly an issue more like feature request or question.

I really like the idea 👍 Good job. But because I use non-solid background, the effect doesn't look like that good with as on the demo gif.

Is there a way to flash by solid color instead of transparency? I mean that you could define blue color & some threshold for blending and this would be used as an "focus" effect.

What do you think?

[Airblader]

It'd have to use an entirely different mechanism, at least. The only (possibly) good way I see is using the composite overlay window to draw in the area of the window in an animated way. Would be quite a bit more involved.

With the current mechanism I don't see how it'd be possible.

[fennerm]

Yeah this is something I'd love to implement but it would be tricky. I'll do some reading on composite overlay windows and try to get a sense of the scale of the problem.

It seems like this might also open up more complicated types of animations though, which would be cool.

[jpmvferreira]

Apologies for bothering, but is this feature something that is still being considered to implementation?
I would certainly enjoy very much if this were to be implemented, and I'm not alone, but I have been discouraged of trying to do so myself because of how hard it seems to be (and how frightening it is to start looking at a new code base).
There doesn't seem to be a "buy me a coffee" section on this Github repository, but I certainly would if there were!

[fennerm]

Hey @jpmvferreira thanks for reaching out. Unfortunately I can't see having time to implement this even with your kind donation offer.

My understanding is that it would be a a bit tricky - especially for someone who has minimal X11 knowledge like myself.

I'd be overjoyed to accept a PR though and would be happy to support however I can.

[jpmvferreira]

In case somebody is looking for a very specific workaround, which suits me well in this case, I've made a small shell script that detects whether the user is focused on a window or not, and if so, sets the background to a given color. Otherwise, if the focus is on the root X window, then it sets the usual background.

Here is the code:

#!/bin/sh

# set desired color
COLOR=grey

xprop -spy -root _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW | stdbuf -o L cut -d " " -f 5 | while read -r WINDID; do	
	if [ "$WINDID" == "0x0" ]; then
		$HOME/.fehbg
	
	else
		hsetroot -solid $COLOR
	fi

done

It requires that the background is set by feh and that hsetroot, stdbuf and xprop are available in your system.
Run this in the background after X has started and it should work (you shouldn't probably trust my shell scripting that much, but it works for me!).

I've been thinking of doing a fade-in/fade-out animation by setting wallpapers really fast, but this would require a set of images to be pre-processed, put in a folder, and then call feh to animate it.
It could be done, but I don't think it would be that straightforward and there are a couple of edge cases which might show up that would require a more robust solution.