[Idle-dev] A Recommendation On Transparent IDLE (with code)

[Guido van Rossum]

I had the same thought — “why would anyone want semi-transparent Windows?”

I always assumed the feature existed to show off GPU features.

But here we have a user who found this so useful that they wrote code to do
it!

So I think it would be interesting to try and understand the use case,
rather than dismissing it.

—Guido

On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 21:41 Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:

> On 11/6/2020 7:02 AM, 17317302007 wrote:
> >
> > Cool IDLE Developers,
> >
> > I am some little user who loves IDLE (xD). When I was taking online
> > courses, I thought it is better if I can use a half-transparent window
> > to program, while having sources or teachers' codes in the background.
> > (btw I use the "Python 3.6.6 (v3.6.6:4cf1f54eb7, Jun 27 2018, 03:37:03)
> > [MSC v.1900 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32" and I do not know if that feature
> > is already there in newer versions.)
> > For that reason, I yeeted through the code and added an "Alpha" tab on
> > the menu to change the transparency of the editor, being noobified by
> > myself (yeah I'm a noob).
> > Actually I just made little changes to the code...
> >
> > Thanks for making this IDLE pure Python so I have the chance to do this!
> > the editor.py is attached below!
>
> (In the future, please post plain text rather than html.)
>
> The last time partial transparency was discussed, the answer was that tk
> did not support it.  However, wm attributes now support an 'alpha'
> attribut (and some other new ones).  I am at least glad you pushed me to
> look.  But it might be ignored on any particular window manager system.
>
> For testing, the patch added these lines
>          text.bind("<<alpha-0>>", lambda event:
> self.top.attributes("-alpha",1))
>          text.bind("<<alpha-1>>", lambda event:
> self.top.attributes("-alpha",0.8))
>          text.bind("<<alpha-2>>", lambda event:
> self.top.attributes("-alpha",0.6))
>          text.bind("<<alpha-3>>", lambda event:
> self.top.attributes("-alpha",0.4))
>
> and an 'Alpha' menu after the 'Help' menu.
>
> However, the idlelib changes since 3.6.6 are so extensive that current
> IDLE will not start with the revised editor.py even after the easy
> fixups. So I have not tested it yet.
>
> Notepad++ has an option to decrease the alpha of the Find dialog to an
> adjustable number either when it looses focus or always.  I believe that
> one of these may have been the default, so some people must like it.
> But I did not and turned it off.  To me, it seems to me even less likely
> to be useful for editor windows.
>
> --
> Terry Jan Reedy
>
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>
-- 
--Guido (mobile)
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