Around one year ago I decided to expand the functionality of simpleswitcher, because my wild ideas did not match with Sean Pringle his vision, I decided to fork it. Since then a lot of changes happened and simpleswitcher (now called Rofi) is no longer simple. On its one year anniversary I decided I wanted to add something to Rofi. It did not have to be something useful, but ‘special’.

Improved transparency

Given a few days before I realized the one year anniversary, I complained about the transparancy being not so nice (the ‘-opacity’ option) especially because it also makes the text transparent. I complained about fixing it being hard, so this is what I set out to do.

So if you X11 setup support TrueColor colormap (any modern one will) and you have a compositor running, you can now specify an alpha channel in each color. This will look like:

As you can see, the background is transparent but the border, text and selected item not. I find this a lot nicer effect then the old transparency.

You can specify the color as follow: argb:AARRGGBB So for a half transparent black background you set: argb:7F000000. So for the above screenshot, the following settings apply:

rofi.fg:                   argb:FFffffff
rofi.bg:                   argb:cc000000
rofi.bgalt:                argb:dd2c3311
rofi.hlfg:                 #fdf6e3
rofi.hlbg:                 #859900
rofi.bc:                   #859900

Logo

I am still looking for a logo for Rofi.

Release

I just release 0.15.1.