Truly Transparent gnome-terminal

[Alan Cox]

> There is no work being done on this at the time being by Keith or 
> anyone else to the best of my knowledge, and while Keith has an 
> interest in doing it, he has interests in many other things as 

The DirectFB X server has roughly the right bits in the right place. The
big big issue with translucent windows is that you need all the visible bits
plus overlaid bits of all the windows around. At that point for non smart 
cards you can composite rectangles in main memory and blit when there is
translucency or on anything with rudimentary 3D support you use the 3D
engine. You composite the windows as if each window was one or more 
textures (you get crazy stuff like bending windows, mapping them around
spheres and the like for free too 8))

In XFree 4.x the upper layers are happy with this, the rendering code is
happy with this (minus having the right 3D accel functions for the
compositing) but the bit in the middle has some definite ideas about on
and offscreen pixmaps.

Alan