JW’s blog

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to set up transparent, pseudo-transparent in fact, window decorations (title bars and window borders) in KDE. Using Crystal and KDE, it’s very easy to set up a fresh and unique desktop environment, with a touch of transparency, like the one in the picture on the right.

First, you’ve got to download a good wallpaper, because the decorations will be pseudo-transparent. They’ll not really display what’s underneath them, but rather the part of your wallpaper that’s underneath. Therefore, you definitely need a good wallpaper. I suggest using one that reflects the season, I’m currently using Grass, and have used stOrmgreen during March and April, because it fitted really good with the weather then. The fact that the decorations are based on the wallpaper also has the advantage that, to change the theme of your whole desktop environment, you can simply change your background, and all title bars will automatically reflect the changes.

KDE comes with a tool included that allows you to download wallpapers from KDE-Look.org, this however does not prohibit you from using other images. You can change the wallpaper by right-clicking on your desktop and selecting “Configure desktop…”, or by selecting “Desktop” and then “Background” in KDE’s Control Center. By clicking on the “Download new backgrounds” button, you can download wallpapers directly from KDE-Look.org, but you can also use the little folder next to the selected image. Anyway, it may take some time to find the right wallpaper, but once you find one you can continue.

To add the transparency to KDE, we’re going to use Crystal. If you’re running Kubuntu, Crystal may already be installed, and if you’re using Gentoo, Fedora or Debian you can use the software repositories, as described on Crystal’s page at KDE-Look.org. For other distributions, there are a lot of prepackaged version available at the bottom of the page, or else you may compile Crystal yourself, as described there too. Once you’ve installed Crystal, you can go to “Appearance” in the system settings, and select “Window Decorations” there. Then, you can enable Crystal and configure it into the details.

Without doubt, the function you’re most looking out for is the transparency. In the Background tab, you can enable transparency with a checkbox, and then some functions below become activated. There, you can set up how the transparency works. This is separated into active and inactive windows, and for each of them you may set up a different style. First, you may select the effect you want to add to the decoration, for example “semi-transparent”. The amount setting allows you to define how transparent the window decoration will be, differing from 0 for completely transparent to 100 for not transparent at all. You may also blur the image with the “Blur image” setting, I set this to 10 for active windows. The outline setting, finally, allows you set up what color and style the border around the decoration will have, and the inline setting what color and style the inside of the titlebar and decoration will have.

The other effects (Intensify, Brighten, Lessen saturation and Solarisation) may be useful for an inactive window. I set this to lessen the saturation with an amount of 70, and no blur. This makes the title bar of my inactive windows sharper than those of active windows (it’s not blurred), but more gray, so it imitates the effect title bars currently have. You may also experiment a bit with other settings, like rounded corners, the width of the title bar and window border (30 and 5 for me, respectively), the look of the buttons (I used Crystal Knifty), an overlay…

Using this all, you can easily set up a complete personal desktop environment, which can easily be changed to a complete new style with a different background. This example also shows how customizable KDE is: with a few clicks I was able to add a touch of transparency to the environment. The nice thing about this is, that it’s a lot faster than the more advanced transparency, which is still in alpha stage. If you want to experiment with those, there are a few options available in the “Window Behaviour” module of the “Desktop” part of KDE’s System Settings. These advanced technologies allow you to make whole windows, but also only window decorations, transparent (not pseudo-transparent), but are unfortunately still very slow. Therefore, I prefer this way of adding transparency to KDE, while it isn’t “real transparency”, it at least seems so, and the computer stays at speed.