Please reimplement Compiz' Opacify plugin! 😃

[Photon89]

Hi guys,

to be honest, I'm not even a Wayfire user yet, because X11+Xfce+Compiz do the job so far, but it looks like the moment when X11 will ultimately die isn't that far away already. So I'm considering my options and it looks like Wayfire is the way to go to get all the Compiz features.

One plugin which I use with Compiz is the Opacify plugin. I don't know whether it has a big userbase, but for some reason I got really attached to it. It's actually really cool: If you have several windows on your screen which are partially blocking each other, you can hover any window and all windows which are (partially) blocking it become transparent. This way, you can for example type into a foreground window which has been made transparent and thus doesn't block a background window which you can watch/read while typing into the transparent foreground window.

I see that various Compiz plugins aren't available in Wayfire so far (while there are new and fancy ones that don't exist in Compiz!). I am wondering, if there are technical limitations which make reimplementing the Opacify plugin in Wayfire difficult or even impossible, or whether it's just not considered a priority (so far)?

Thanks for developing and maintaining Wayfire to everybody involved, it really looks great!

[soreau]

Hi @Photon89 and thanks for your post. There is an ipc script in wayfire-plugins-extra that already implements a basic version of trailfocus. Of course you want opacify plugin functionality which would require knowing the mouse cursor position so at the time of this writing, it is not clear whether or not you can do this via IPC scripting. However there is no technical limitation, anyone can write an opacify plugin for Wayfire. You might be the first person to ask about it and it hasn't been a goal to implement all compiz plugins in Wayfire. If you want to try your hand at writing it as a Wayfire plugin, you can get real time support on chat. Cheers.

[Photon89]

Hi @soreau, thanks for the fast and informative reply! I'm not sure whether I'll be able to tackle this myself, but I'll give it a shot in the summer holidays, thanks for the useful hints for getting started!