#8 icewmtray: transparent parts of gdk/gtk app icons broken

[Thomas Zajic]

icewmtray doesn't handle the transparent parts of gdk/gtk based application icons properly. This is especially noticable with themes that do not use a light-gray toolbar background. Qt based application icons (eg. sim) seem to be handled correctly.

The attached screenshot shows three icons in icewmtray's systray area: sim[1] (the red flower, Qt-based, transparency ok), xpad[2] (the yellow post-it, gdk/gtk-based, transparency wrong) and gaim[3]/opengaim[4] (the small yellow guy, gdk/gtk/gnome2-based, transparency wrong). Note that the xmms and aumix icons on the left aren't systray icons handled by icewmtray, but minimized-to-tray-exclusively icons handled by icewm (ie. *.tray: Exclusive in ~/.icewm/winoptions).

This problem only affects icewmtray, whereas the transparent parts are handled properly in all other areas (menu, toolbar buttons, window icons, minimized-window toolbar icons). I'm using xfree86-4.2.1, icewm-1.2.14pre12 and gtk+2.4.0 (the problem was also present with gtk+-2.2.x).

[1] http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sim-icq/sim-0.9.3-2.tar.gz?download
[2] http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/xpad/xpad-1.13.tar.bz2?download
[3] http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gaim/gaim-0.76.tar.bz2?download
[4] http://belnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/opengaim/opengaim-0.75c.tar.gz

[Thomas Zajic]

Taskbar screenshot

[Adam Pribyl]

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I think it's not a bug. See also bug #883784 and the refered
one.

The "not transparent" backgournd is caused by the fact, that
the icon in tray from gtk apps is provided by gtk - with
background set by gtk. Means if you change gtk theme, also
the color in tray will change. At least this way it worked
with qt and kde apps.

[Thomas Zajic]

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Yes, you're right - thanks for the hint! :-)

After looking through
http://www.gtk.org/tutorial/sec-widgethierarchy.html,
http://www.gtk.org/tutorial/sec-widgetswithoutwindows.html
and a couple of assorted GTK+ header files, it appears that
GTK's standard functions for providing a tray icon use the
GtkEventBox widget class. Setting an appropriate background
color for this widget class in ~/.gtkrc-2.0 solves the problem.

Just in case someone else gets bitten by this, here's the
relevant part from my ~/.gtkrc-2.0:

style "user-image" {
bg[NORMAL] = { 0.67, 0.74, 0.70 }
}
class "GtkEventBox" style "user-image"

Again, thanks for the hint!

[Thomas Zajic]

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Something related just came to my mind - a feature request
for the wishlist maybe? Would it be possible for icewmtray to:

1. Detect whether GTK+ is available (maybe simply via
"#ifdef CONFIG_GNOME_MENUS"?)
2. If yes, remember the current value of GtkEventBox::bg[NORMAL]
3. Set GtkEventBox::bg[NORMAL] to the current
ColorDefaultTaskBar
4. Draw the systray icon as usual
5. Restore the original value of GtkEventBox::bg[NORMAL]
6. Continue as usual

This would definitely be a nice addition (although pure eye
candy, admittedly ;-) - users wouldn't need to fiddle around
with their ~/.gtkrc files, and the systray icons would
automagically show the right transparency color even after
switching IceWM's theme.

Comments?

[Thomas Zajic]

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Okay, this most probably won't work, because (as far as I
understand the underlying mechanisms) GTK+ applications do
the resource file parsing by themselves, so icewmtray
basically only receives (a pointer to) the ready-to-display
icon with GTK+ theme settings already applied.

Alternative proposal (and probably easier to implement as well):

In addition to writing ~/.icewm/theme, write a small
~/.icewm/gtkrc containing the few lines below, with
fg[NORMAL] set to the current ColorDefaultTaskBar value
(GTK+ also accepts standard "#abcdef" hex color triplets in
double quotes as color values, so there's no need to convert
icewm's internal format to GTK+ style float triplets). Then
leave it up to the user to use this setting via either the
$GTK2_RC_FILES environment variable or a simple "include
~/.icewm/gtkrc" statement in their ~/.gtkrc[-2.0] files.

Advantages of this approach: no bloat (ie. no need to link
icewmtray against GTK+, just write a small textfile),
flexible (ie. easily expandable/adjustable for future GTK+
versions), rather easy to do for the user (ie. add the
"include" statment once, and be done with it - the result is
updated automagically).

I'll probably submit an appropriate patch myself when/if I
get around to do it.

[Marko Macek]

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automatic generation of (part of?) .gtkrc might be done for
icewm-1.3