Cannot find a way to make the window transparent.
Hi @triplemaya,
If your system supports transparency (most systems do), there should be slider at the bottom of the window, named Opacity. It should appear right after the Velocity slider.
If you don’t see it, QPrompt might be hiding it automatically. Making your window wider should make it appear.
If you still don’t see it, go to Main menu > Other Settings, and make sure that “Disable Background Transparency” is not active.
The only system where this feature is known not to work is HaikuOS. It can also fail to work on systems that don’t offer window compositing, such as older Raspberry Pis and when power saving features are enabled in Nvidia GPUs.
Thanks. Making the window full size gives me the velocity slider as well as the font size slider, but no opacity slider.
Then looking in other settings I found how to make it appear.
But it still just shows grey. I am still not seeing the window underneath.
Running Mint MATE latest version all updated so it seems unlikely the system does not support transparency. Anything I can try?
This sounds like a limitation of either the MATE desktop’s compositor or its window manager.
In MacOS, window frames extend all the way to the bottom of the window. This means that making a the background transparent shows the window frame instead of the contents behind the window. Given that you’re seeing gray and not black, I think the same thing might be happening here. Black would mean the compositor isn’t drawing anything behind QPrompt’s window.
Given MATE is the continuation of Gnome 2, you could probably work around this using Compiz to handle compositing and decorations instead of whatever Mint’s MATE is currently using. You could also try switching the compositor to Compton, which is lightweight and known to work well with QPrompt, but this alone wouldn’t fix the problem if the issue stems from window decorations.
Back in the Gnome 2 days the window manager used to be known as Metacity, I don’t know if it’s still called that, but I would look into options related to window decorations. Selecting a different decoration might help. Disabling decorations in certain circumstances, such as when the app is in full screen might also help.
From the Arch wIki: MATE - ArchWiki
Undecorating maximized windows
Hiding the decorations of maximized windows is possible with the use of mate-tweakAUR tool; after installation navigate to Look and Feel > MATE Tweak > Windows in the System Preferences and enable Undecorate maximized windows in the Window Behaviour section.
Hi Javier. Thanks again. Fired it up again and it just worked this time!?
This is a really great app. Thank you so much for all your help.
Kind regards
Andrew Soltau
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Woohoo! I suspect it may have just been that either QPrompt or the OS needed to be restarted for the recently activated feature to work. I’m glad that it worked for you. If you need any more help, feel free to ask!
Hi, I’m on a lenovo Yoga 7 and facing the same issue. i tried the methods above and to restart the laptop but the opacity slider isn’t showing up for me. Any suggestions?
Hi @pdl,
Make sure you’re in edit mode, then increase the width of your window until the slider shows up.
If you can’t make the window wide enough for the opacity slider to show up, go to Countdown and make sure that, at Auto frame is checked and Auto start is not checked. Now, when you click on Start prompter (which is not to be confused with Start prompting), the prompter will enter a “ready top start prompting state”. The Font size slider will be hidden and you should see the Opacity slider in its place.
Usually windows are wide enough so that both sliders are shown, most likely this isn’t the case here. This is because of a compromise I took to guarantee enough of the prompter could be seen when using QPrompt on devices with small and lower resolution displays.
Would you mind letting me know a few details about your setup? These will help me understand your situation better and make the necessary changes to prevent this from happening in future builds:
- What version of QPrompt are you running? You can find this out in the About QPrompt section of the app.
- What operating system and operating system version are you running? E.g. Windows 11, Ubuntu 24.04…
- What’s your display resolution?
- What’s the scaling factor for your display?
I hope this helps and thank you for the details.
Hi,
the Opacity slider showed up post starting prompting but dissapears when I stop it. Its fine though - I can adjust it to the required level and it stays there.
Vertion 31.0.2 -
windows 11 home
2240x1400 resolution
scaling 175%