Re: Could bgex patch or similar be added?

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Ivan Andrus <darthandrus@gmail.com> writes:
> I was wondering if there are any plans for something like this to be
> integrated into emacs.  Miles Bader's transparent emacs branch may  have
> done this, but I could never find it, so I assume it died.

No, it's still alive, in some sense at least.

The debate over whether it should be merged into emacs centered largely
over whether it was a useful feature, i.e., whether its benefits
justified adding more complexity to the Emacs display engine.  That
debate (a few years ago) petered out without any obvious resolution.

Of course if it _is_ worthwhile, I'd rather like to see my patch merged
instead of someone else's, unless their patch is obviously
superior... :)

From my brief look at the bgex patch, it only lets you define window
backgrounds.  The tiling patch uses what I think is a somewhat more
flexible and powerful approach -- it lets you associate images with
_faces_, so e.g., your region can have a different background image than
normal text, etc.  As recent Emacs allows buffer-specific versions of
faces (using face-remapping), this lets you define per-buffer
backgrounds too.  The tiling patch also allows some simple run-time
image filtering so that you can, e.g., make an image "dimmer" without
changing the actual image file (something that's particularly handy when
defining backgrounds for non-default faces -- you can, for instance,
make the `region' face's background image a tweaked version of the
default face's background image).

-Miles

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