Click-through transparency
27 Aug 2004 
in the early evening 
Matt Winckler
I just had what I consider to be a fabulous idea in the area of desktop environment development. There are several projects in the X-Windows world that are working on window transparency (i.e. for consoles and such)–both fake (where the window background is set to your desktop background and aligned so that it gives the illusion of transparency) and real (where any windows behind the transparent one will actually be rendered as they appear).
My idea is to utilize the fake transparency and add a level of functionality to it–namely, to be able to click through to items on your desktop when you hold down a modifier key (i.e. Ctrl+Alt+Click would pass the click event handler through to the desktop instead of being caught by the window). That way, when you have a desktop full of applications in Windows (because of the marked lack of virtual desktops), you could enable window transparency (perhaps with another key sequence), then use the click-through feature to start an app from a desktop icon. This would save you from having to use “Show desktop”, which minimizes all your windows and ruins the order you had them in.
This idea would of course require Windows to start supporting window transparency, and would probably only really be useful in Windows–since Linux has virtual desktops, people like me just have at least ((number of desktops needed for apps) +1) set up to keep one freed up for stuff like this.
…
Well hm. This ought to teach me a lesson–Google before writing posts. A quick Google search turns up Actual Transparent Windows, which has something called “Ghost mode”, which seems to do pretty much what I want. For $20. Bleh.