Does anyone have experience in creating graphical applications that do not use the window system? One example that comes to mind would be Conky. I’m looking to do something similar but multi-platform if possible.
Like an applet or somethitg like i3?
Conky is rendered in a window, it uses a few tricks to hide that fact.
For windows, because I missed conky, I use Rainmeter. For windows, see how they do it, I dont have a clue, just like how it works.
So it is drawn in a window and the frame and background are hidden? Might be easier than I thought. I’ll provably give this a try. It would also have to stay behind other applications and not be moveable. The main idea I’m going for is a startup widget that appears to be part of the desktop.
frame is hidden, in the case of conky it takes a screenshot of the root window (which contains your desktop background) and renders that at the bottom of the paint stack when the window refreshes. This is why it used to not work on KDE
Seems like a crazy workaround for something that appears to be otherwise simple. I wonder if there is a better approach? Thanks for the information.
The other option is desktop environment specific widgets. If there’s any luck, maybe some cross-platform GUI libs can create cross-platform widgets, have no knowledge on anything like that though.