Transperent shell window?

[Karlos]

Transparency sucks :-) Or rather the lack of implementation support does...

Assuming you mean transparent as in magic menu, etc, no matter what graphics card you have, there is nothing in the graphics.library to support this kind of transparency directly, so no hardware acceleration. As far as I am aware, all transparent gimmicks on amigaos currently work by grabbing the hidden area and then doing the transparency in software and writing it back. In other words it's a CPU hog. It's also not realtime because of the calculation overhead (only recalculated when you move or resize). If something changes behind your window, you won't see it happen.

Anyway a transparent console would be confusing if it overlayed stuff with a lot of text on it already :-)

[Karlos]

vic20owner wrote:

This is the same way it works in Linux, etc.

You tend to have more powerful hardware then. Doing transparency on a 68K amiga in this fashion with a CPU to VRAM bandwidth of maybe 10MB/s and VRAM to CPU of 4 MB/s, it is no fun at all doing transparency calculations on things much larger than your average menu...

If you want that kind of thing, HW accelerated user interfaces are the way forwards IMO. Transparent shells in OSX etc work very well (speed wise I mean, I find transparent shells etc rather pointless if it decreases their readability).