Greyscale desktop

[Bernard]

A very interesting accessibility feature would be a plugin which would make the whole desktop grayscale. The Mac OS X has this feature as an accessibility option. At first I was thinking that it is useless but I tried it and it is not bad a all - it is more comfortabe for eyes. A friend was allready asking me if this is possible to do in Linux too. So probably some people would welcome grayscale desktop more than flying windows :-)

Of course I turn it off when I'm going to watch a movie but during work it is very good.

[RYX]

Hi Bernard!

Do you mean that you want to have all windows grayed out (i.e. desaturated) and only the active/focused window to be colored? If so - that is already possible, I just can't remember which plugin you need for that (I think it is the trailfocus-plugin from the compiz-extra package).

Can anyone remember which plugin did that? I know I had that feature somewhen ...

:)

[rememo]

@RYX:

Yes it's the trailfocus plugin. I think if you set the parameters properly you could achieve what you said, BUT I think Bernard meant to turn the whole desktop to a Black&White (like photos) appearence. This is what the negative plugin is currently doing by inverting the colormap, but in this case one would have to change the colormap to a grayscale.

[Bernard]

@RYX:

Yes it's the trailfocus plugin. I think if you set the parameters properly you could achieve what you said, BUT I think Bernard meant to turn the whole desktop to a Black&White (like photos) appearence. This is what the negative plugin is currently doing by inverting the colormap, but in this case one would have to change the colormap to a grayscale.

This is exactly what I mean. Whole desktop Black&White. Since Apple is providing it, it is probably usefull. There culd be also setting that grayscaling would not be to [0..255] but to for example to [50..200] - it provides a way to reduce contrast I guess. This would be much cleaner solution for reducing contrast than creating a special gnome themes with reduced contrast.

Well maybe there could be also a fullsceen sephia efect :) But it is just a "fantasy". The previous graying would be a good thing.

BTW: On OSX it is even possible to invert color map and grayscale at once. Maybe also good for accessibility but me perosnally I don't use it.

[mikedee]

Here you go, its a fairly rough plugin which just makes all windows desaturated.

http://www.anykeysoftware.co.uk/compiz/plugins/blackandwhite.tar.gz

To install it just unzip and type make install and then add blackandwhite to your plugins list.

Something like this will most likely be added to the bs plugin, or the new winrules one.

[gnumdk]

bs plugin already do this i think.
Just put a type=.* shloud work i think.

[mikedee]

I think the keyword any does it too

[RYX]

If it allows such things, then the bs-plugin could really use a more descriptive name :) ...

[I remember I had a javascript that did that - but the JS-plugin is crappy and didn't allow much more than that and playing with the "mousecodes"-script (mousewheel-combinations that worked like the lock on a safe - an action like UpUpDownUpDownDown could be assigned a command to be executed ... pretty useless but funny :) ...)]

:)

[gnumdk]

http://forum.go-compiz.org/viewtopic.php?t=638

It now use regex matching feature like with opacity in core (current git)

So, if you put type=any (thanks mikedee), it should work!

[Bernard]

Thank you very much for your support! I hope you enjoy your work and I wish you the best of luck. :wink: