MacDownApp / MacDownApp/macdown

window transparency / opacity feature

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enhancement
Dominant language
Rich Text Format
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Description

Users with smaller screens (e.g., laptops) may benefit from the ability to control the background transparency view of the editor window, because a "see through" window would allow the user to copy/revise from other documents simultaneously without having to tab-switch to other windows.

This feature has been part of [iTerm2](https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2) for many years, and is also present in MacOS native Terminal.app. It is also present in TextMate2 in versions 2.0.6 and below, but recent versions have broken the feature.

The idea is that the user can set the window's background view to a desired transparency / opacity, but the window will draw foreground objects like text, highlighting, or images at full. [Here's an SO post with suggestions in Swift, not super relevant but maybe a start since MacDown uses NSWindow?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34531118/how-can-i-create-a-window-with-transparent-background-with-swift-on-osx) Finally, here's a sreenshot of what it looks like with TextMate 2.0.6 on MacOS 10.13.6.

Screen Shot 2020-04-15 at 11 27 35 AM

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by examining the editor window's NSWindow usage and the linked Swift transparency suggestions. The feature is done when users can control the window's background opacity while foreground text, highlighting, and images remain fully opaque.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
macos, objective-c
Domain
desktop
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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