urxvt-clickthrough(1)

💅 urxvt-clickthrough — the urxvt-clickthrough(1) page, bestie edition ✨

okay so this is a page from the RXVT-UNICODE manual, and it's genuinely one of the coolest little tricks in here, no cap. buckle up. 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

clickthrough — makes a window "transparent" with respect to input events 🫶

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

# create a transparent non-interactable overlay
urxvt -override-redirect -depth 32 -bg "[0]black" -clickthrough on -e top

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

So this extension toggles your terminal window between "normal" mode and "clickthrough" mode. And in clickthrough mode, input events — clicks, the whole vibe — go through the window, literally as if the window weren't even there. 💀

What's that for? Picture putting a (preferably partially transparent, because aesthetics ✨) window in front of your other windows, and then letting all your clicks and other events sail right on through to the window underneath. it's giving ghost window. it's giving main character energy but invisible. 👑

There's an example over at https://shallowsky.com/blog/2017/Apr/06/ if you want to see it in action.

This extension loads itself automatically when you pass the -clickthrough mode command line argument, and it operates in one of three modes:

• "disable" (the default) — everything works normally, and the OSC sequence is not active. plain, unbothered, moisturized. 🙈
• "on" — events go through the window, and you can toggle this via an OSC sequence. the icon behavior. 🔥
• "off" — events act normally, but you can still toggle it via an OSC sequence.

🌸 OSC SEQUENCE 🌸

When it's enabled, the OSC sequence 777;clickthroughmode is what you use to change the clickthrough mode. Example time — switch it on, then switch it off again:

printf '\033]777;clickthrough:on\007'
printf '\033]777;clickthrough:off\007'

look at that. two little printfs and your window becomes a ghost. we love to see it. ⭐

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💀 BUGS 💀

ngl, this part is a little rough, so read carefully bestie:

For this to actually work as expected, your window manager needs to support shaped windows fully — but most of them only have partial support. 😭 The only window manager known to handle this correctly is openbox 3.7.

A workaround is to also use -override-redirect.

And there's more: input shapes don't seem to be well supported in Xorg either, which sometimes means it doesn't generate the necessary events for window managers. The way this extension currently works around that is by re-setting the input shape after every map event. 🧚

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fr fr, small window managers are doing their best but shaped windows got them stressed.

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and that's the whole thing! this page came to you from version 9.31, dated 2023-12-02, out of the RXVT-UNICODE manual. slay, go make some transparent overlays, and remember: your window manager is probably not openbox 3.7. 💜🎀