Applications turn black upon activation

dgurkaynak / Penc

Trackpad-oriented window manager for macOS

https://deniz.co/penc/

MIT License

1.11k stars 25 forks source link

Applications turn black upon activation #44

Closed lilyspad closed 1 year ago

lilyspad commented 1 year ago

Hi there, I recently downloaded this app through the penc.app website, which was version 0.4.1 which I upgraded to the most recent version through the brew command. I have been struggling however as I have found that anytime I activate the application using the default command x 2 input, all applications turn black outside of their icon and the name of the application. No settings changes I could do seemed to make any impact on this issue. I am using a MacBook Pro M1 (2020) while running MacOS 13.0 (22A380). Included are two screenshots demonstrating what I mean. Functionality of moving the apps around is no problem, only visual impact.

dgurkaynak commented 1 year ago

Yep, this is how Penc works. When Penc is activated, it blurs out your real display and draws a black overlay rectangle for each visible window. This is what we call "activation". In activation mode, the only thing you should do is to move or resize the windows.

Displaying an overlay window is a technical design choice, because resizing a real window can be really costly depending on its complexity. For example a Safari window displaying an average website is resized in 2-5 frames per second on my mac. However operating on placeholder overlay windows is much more snappy.

I definitely admit that it's not the prettiest design though 😅

dgurkaynak commented 1 year ago

Closing the issue since there is nothing to do about it. Let me know if you need anything else.

Yann-R commented 1 year ago

Hi, Sorry to come a bit late to (re)open this discussion.

I understand the answer confirming that a black overlay windows is done by design (and saves costly refresh of the resized windows)
Nevertheless could there be a "transparency" effect through this black overlay, so as to give a visual result a bit closer to the demo-video available on the README page? (or make this transparency an option in the preferences?)

Best regards,

dgurkaynak commented 1 year ago

Hey @Yann-R, that demo video is from previous version (v0.x). In that version, we were showing a black overlay for only one window (focused one or the one under the cursor). With version 1.x, we started to show black overlays for every visible window. I remember I tried transparent overlays but when you have lots of overlapping windows, the activation view looks too cluttered & ugly.

And also in v1.x, you can resize different windows in a single activation (like this). And if you're resizing more than 1 window, seeing the actual windows no longer makes sense IMO. That's the main motivation I chose to go with opaque overlays.