Source
r/Polybar•
Public-Disorder

Transparency on the system tray

Hey guys. I have a fully (100%) transparent bar that is heavily blurred by Compton to make it readable.

My issue is that the system tray is not getting blurred, which makes it less readable and also ruins the, otherwise unified, look that I have.

It's my understanding that the tray always enables pseudo transparency now, so I suspect this is the cause. The thing is, it doesn't seem to be possible to turn it off. The option to do so has been deprecated and transparency is always enabled, according to the wiki. I've tried setting the option anyway and there was no change.

Is there a way around this problem that I'm missing or am I just stuck with this?

Posted Feb 21, 2020, 1:11 AM UTC

74
patrick96MC•

I think you are pretty much out of luck. We disabled real transparency in the tray in favor of pseudo-transparency, because according to the author of the pseudo-transparency feature it would be a highly invasive change to have real and pseudo transparency in the tray.

You may be able to set a fully opaque background in the tray and use your compositor to replace that with a fully transparent (and blurred one).

3
Public-DisorderOP•

That's disappointing. I had considered trying to set an opaque background, I will give it a try. Thanks for the input

1
manyroads•

So far as I can tell, polybar (which I use and like) does a poor job of handling (displaying) the system tray. I use tint2 for that and indicating active/ open windows. Tint2 does these functions quite well, in my experience.

1
Public-DisorderOP•

I would be fine with its handling of the tray if it looked consistent with the rest of the bar.

Thanks for the heads up about tint2, I'll check it out. Might be a simpler solution

2