Glowing Buttons

Today Cornelius added support for drawing titlebar button images outside the window on hover, which means cool stuff like glowing buttons is now possible... (In fact, it draws two images, the normal button and a glow overlay)

Edit: the forum post with patches is here

He says:

implemented button glow (for the hovered buttons of the active window) in cgwd. Here is the patch. The glow overlay image should consist of 7 images of same size for the 7 button types.
....
To enable glow:
Add this line to the end of the [buttons] section of your theme.ini file (mine is at /.compiz/cgwd):
glow=your-glow-image.png

And here is his screenshot of the glowing buttons




The actual glow.png should look like this

Blurring behind the window borders

Idon'tknow12 has released a blur plugin that blurs just what is behind the window borders!

So, it looks like there are no compelling reasons to even consider Vista anymore :P

From the original post:

This plugin blurs things underneath the decoration, through a fragment shader [and] currently is using the one found in the Frag plugin to do so

Along with Quinn's latest additions to gwd (note that she is developing cgwd too) it is now possible to have window borders that look exactly like pretty damn similar (Thanks SparX) to Vista's! The developments required to make them identical are on the way!

Idon'tknow12's screenshot:You can get all the information over in thread on the the Compiz Forums
The latest version (at time of writing) is here

A new window decorator

QuinnStorm has made a new window decorator, catchily named 'custom-generic-window-decorator' and it is now ready for anyone to use. Her post about the release is here and her original announcment is here


Quite how there are already so many themes available when the 'relese' post was only 2 days ago astounds me - here a few to show off the variety

Here you can see Vista-Ish, Community (which looks really cool when you mouseover the cube!), Siro, OSX and Gilouche

From the release post:

I'm tired of not working on anything, and of course will gladly scrap the project should someone come up with a really better solution, but I think its time to start implementing my ideas for a new window-decorator. If this project works, and only once it does, I'll revert the g-w-d distributed with my compiz (and thus the decoration plugin) to their original state.

She has reverted gwd as described so you need cgwd and if you want to use will need to change your compiz start script. cgwd is in Quinn's repo:

From the repo front page

* remove patched g-w-d, in favor of cgwd
* to use cgwd, install packages 'cgwd' and 'gcompizthemer' and if you like,
'gcompizthemer-themes' (cgwd >= 0.1, gcompizthemer >= 0.13,
gcompizthemer-themes >= 0.5)

jesper has added support for all sizes of icons- see his post here

Look Ma, No Shaders!

Blurry things seem to be coming thick and fast these days!

julio has released a blur plugin that doesn't use Shaders!

You should note that this is very early stages and therea re a number of limitations: read all about them here, specifically, it is still very slow...

More fun with shaders - Copacity

...Conditional Opacity

This new plugin by Michael Callahan makes parts of the window that are similar to the background colour transparent, leaving things in the foreground as bright as they should be! At the moment it uses black as a background colour, but as the post says, that can change if people like it.

Michael's post explains all very well

Legacy applications don't support transparency. Composition managers work around this by allowing each window to have a global transparency value. However the correct behavior for most windows is to have the background color be translucent and the foreground be opaque so that text is more visible.

The conditional opacity filter works around this by using a fragment shader to only make colors that are close to the background color transparent. The rest of the colors remain opaque. The included screenshot shows a comparison of and emacs window using the copacity filter on the left and normal transparency on the right. The text fade is clearly visible between the two windows.

The plugin is hard coded to use BLACK as the background color pending a review of the usefulness of the plugin and what the user interface should look like. It also doesn't set the transparency of the window but rather preserves the existing value. The current usage is to set a window up with black background and light foreground, then use transset to set the transparency value to the desired amount, then -c to turn on the copacity effect.

And a screenshot (from the original post)

Blurring is here

3rd time lucky!

Quickee has posted code and a compiled lib for a new plugin to the forums to blur windows! When used with Trailfocus it allows blurring of inactive windows. According to the author, it uses pixel shaders like water and is based on neg:

I created a fragment program (pixel shaders) plugin out of neg and water, which currently supports gaussian bluring of windows. It currently misuses saturation for blur setting so saturation doesn't work. For visible effect set trailfocus plugin minimum_window_saturation_level to 1, maximum_window_saturation_level to 100 and max_trail_count to 2. To enable the plugin press s for the whole screen and w for the current window only.

Looks like it is time for me to get a card with pixel shaders!

The latest version of the lib is here

Themeing the widow borders (sort of)

In a flurry of activity on the forum Quinn has released a tool to allow us to theme the colours and the transparency of the window decorations, and managers for the themes seem to be spawning all over the place!

It started with this post by kr0n0, which was followed up by Quinn's post:

Just to bump this thread, I'm playing around with this now since theming seems so far away, and working on creating a very-customizable patch to g-w-d (with a bool to switch back to the old behaviour should you wish)

Followed by this

This is going into cvs in just a moment.

The defaults still need some tweaking and there are tons of options to play with.

Make SURE you install new schemas

Turn on /apps/compiz/plugins/decoration/allscreens/options/use_new_decor

The post was 'hidden' in the Q and A forum and I built this CVS without even knowing the option was there :P

Moppsy posted a patch to get rid of the white 'halo' on windows here (which is in the CVS now)

There are a few posts on installing the new schemas here and here for a very useful post by moppsy on how to set the colours and transparency keys from the command line.

But we don't need that anymore :)

It all (seems) to start with this mockup by SparX
More mockups, refinements and code was contributed by Melissa, Chanders and Treviño, who has added settings to gset-compiz (picture).

strash has released a python tool aswell

The picture above is Quinn's tool based on the GUI designs by the above (with her own tweaks)

Quinn's most recent post says she will keep settings in ~/.compiz/themes.

So it looks like Tommie-Lie has a while to finish his complete windec themeing before we get restless again :P