Hello,

I have shadows enabled in X (using xfce4 compositor). My questions are:

1. Can you change the look of the shadow's, size, opacity and colour?
2. Can you exclude certain apps/windows from having shadows applied to them?

Thanks to all

You are pretty limited as to what you can do with just the basic Composite extension. You can give xcompmgr a few command arguments to change the shadow opacity, radius, and relative position (I.E. where the light source is), but that is pretty much it.

To do more advanced things like shadow colors and per-window overrides, you need to use Beryl (or Compiz Fusion, whenever it is ready). Beryl shouldn't take a whole lot more resources than the normal compositor, assuming you don't go crazy with the effects. That is, if you are concerned about your hardware's performance running Beryl over the compositor.

Thanks for your reply,

All I need really is what you stated: radius and opacity.

Since XFCE4 compositor just turns shadows on and off, XFCE4 just checks to see if I have the following enabled in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf right?

I cannot find xcompmgr on my machine but I have shadows enabled. Is this something I install after to manipulate the basic settings that are already enabled?

If I give xcompmgr a few arguments will they be stored in config file and remain until I change arguments again?

Thanks for clearing things up,
Regards

You can get xcompmgr from freedesktop.org, which you would use in place of the XFCE compositor. You can't use both at the same time, so just turn compositing off in the XFCE configuration.

Then you would configure xcompmgr with the command line arguments to change the various aspects to your liking. There are many examples out there, but the only way to really get it suited to your liking is to read the man page and play around with it.