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How to remove the borders around transparent urxvt windows?

asked Jun 27 '12

joepd gravatar image

When opening multiple urxvt windows with transparency enabled, there are regions around the borders where transparency does not work. The border is black. How can this be fixed?

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answered Sep 19 '12

teddyballgame gravatar image

updated Sep 20 '12

EDIT: The latest version of i3 now ignores resize hints so this is not necessary.

Comments

And "latest version" is a meaningless statement, so let’s say 4.3 instead :-).

Michael gravatar imageMichael (Sep 20 '12)edit
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answered Jun 27 '12

this post is marked as community wiki

This post is a wiki. Anyone with karma >100 is welcome to improve it.

The border around transparent urxvt windows is because urxvt is only dealing with the space it can really use itself. The leftover space is too small to put an extra character, so urxvt is not displaying it. i3 does not implement transparency, but leaves it to the applications to apply pseudo-transparency. This results in a black border. At the moment, it is not likely that either urxvt will fix this behavior, and the i3 devs seem to have other priorities at the moment.

Comments

note: the border is drawn by i3 because otherwise you have graphics corruption in that space in non-transparent setups. You can remove the relevant lines in the code for now. Also note: transparency is neither endorsed nor supported by the i3 devs, so we don’t care about transparency issues :).

Michael gravatar imageMichael (Jun 27 '12)edit

Actually, urxvt does seem to support window managers that do not honor its size hints now. I just did a short test by using URxvt.transparency and commenting out the part of i3 that handles the size increment hints (src/handlers.c 743 to 757). It works quite nicely.

Klaas gravatar imageKlaas (Jun 28 '12)edit

An addition to the above: this is not an acceptable solution in general. An option would be to add something like 'for window [class="URxvt"] sizehints disable'. Awesome WM offer such an option for example. I may work on a patch for that sometime...

Klaas gravatar imageKlaas (Jun 29 '12)edit

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Asked: Jun 27 '12

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Last updated: Sep 20 '12