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stephane-13 / gnome-shell-extension-dim-background-windows

A gnome shell extension dimming background / non-focused windows
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Dim desktop/wallpaper #25

Open UserrX opened 6 months ago

UserrX commented 6 months ago

Thank you for creating this extension. It works great on my Arch Gnome 46 install. This post is an idea/feature request.

Is it possible to add an option to dim the desktop/wallpaper as well? When I connect my notebook to a monitor, which typically is a 27" or larger model, I find that the wallpaper 'brightness', compared to the dimmed windows, is distracting. This is especially the case since on these larger screens I hardly ever put a window in maximised state.

stephane-13 commented 6 months ago

It's unfortunately impossible to affect the brightness of the background wallpaper in the same way as the extension does it for the windows. Gnome extensions don't support such feature.

You could manually set the wallpaper to some darker version using "gsettings set" on org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri or org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri-dark for dark themes. But that's not very flexible.

For example:

if dconf dump /org/gnome/shell/extensions/dim-background-windows/ | grep dimming-enabled=true >/dev/null; then
  # Dimming is enabled, use a darker background
  gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri "my-light-theme-darker-background.jpg"
  gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri-dark "my-dark-theme-darker-background.jpg"
else
  # Dimming is disabled, use a lighter background
  gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri "my-light-theme-lighter-background.jpg"
  gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri-dark "my-dark-theme-lighter-background.jpg"
fi

Such script could be executed in in an endless loop to check every X seconds if the wallpaper must be changed. In theory, you could write another extension that does it automatically by getting a (Gnome) signal when the dimming extension is enabled/disabled.

There is a limitation to this simple scripting approach. It wouldn't work if one uses another extension to manage the wallpapers, for example when using dynamic wallpapers.

I'm closing this issue as the dimming extension can't affect the wallpaper brightness natively. But let me know if you have further questions.

stephane-13 commented 2 weeks ago

I think I found a way to dim the desktop / wallpaper on primary and/or secondary monitors. Version 17 has a new option to control that: https://github.com/stephane-13/gnome-shell-extension-dim-background-windows/tree/v17_gnome45_47

This is being tested, not yet released.