Few days ago I was searching on a nice looking desktop clock, after a bit of search I found “Cairo Clock”, a nice looking theme-able clock.
It had everything one would need from such app (about 10 options), and nothing more. Except for one thing.
No click through?
A feature I needed, was the ability to click-through the clock, i.e. when clicking the clock, the click goes through to the window beneath. I did a lot of research, including looking into x.org and compiz settings for a method to make a complete window clickable, but had no luck.
I settled with it the way it was… No click through? Okay.
Let’s play with the theme…
Today I thought to myself, why not editing the theme, maybe make some parts of it transparent, that would help overall. looking for the files, I found them under /usr/share/cairo-clock/themes/. They are mainly SVG files, I started Inkscape, and started tweaking the layers. I saved, quit cairo-clock and launched it again, and there was my surprise!
Click through & Transparency!
It turned out, that when a layer has less than 50% transparency, it becomes click-through-able! I set all the parts that I needed to 49.9%. I also learned another trick: I can duplicate the layer that I want it to have more 50% transparency, and it would still work!
As you can see in the image above, this is my desktop, and the clock is above it, and I can click through it (right click in here).
Cairo Graphics inherited?
Just another thought, that this feature may be inherited from the graphics framework the clock is built with, so it would apply to other programs built with it as well.
Should you need any help, feel free to ask