[racket] Graphical Toolkit change question

That is indeed my problem. I am using Win32 and panels take the same color as their parent. That is why I could never make something like a background panel with another panel on top that is the same size as the background and only contains for example one button centered in the middle (a.k.a a menu). This would make it easy to be able to hide that "menu" and show another one when the button is clicked. But since the panels take the same color as their parent (in this case the frame), the overlaying panel hides the background panel.

The only workaround I have found is to use a container panel for each of these "menus" that on their own contain the background and then a pane (as panes do show transparent, but cannot be removed unless it's parent is removed) containing the menu. That way I can always show and hide the container panel and create a navigation between menus. The huge problem with this approach is that the background has to be loaded and inserted for each of the menus separately instead of just once in the main frame.

-----Original Message-----
From: Matthew Flatt [mailto:mflatt at cs.utah.edu] 
Sent: donderdag 24 februari 2011 15:11
To: Christophe Vandenberghe
Cc: users at racket-lang.org
Subject: RE: [racket] Graphical Toolkit change question

At Thu, 24 Feb 2011 09:30:26 +0100, "Christophe Vandenberghe" wrote:
> But then again like I said before. It would be easier to have
> transparency for panels, as it would resolve the need for panes
> inserted in panels to be able to hide or delete them when needed.
> That would also solve the background problem. Would that be easy to
> achieve with the new implementation?

I'm not clear on the sense in which panels are currently opaque.

Since siblings are not supposed to overlap, the only kind of window
that can be behind a panel is another panel or eventually a frame.
I'm relatively clear on what happens with Win32 and Cocoa:

 * Under Win32 (the way `racket/gui' currently uses it), all panels and
   frames are the same color, so you can't really tell whether panels
   are transparent (i.e., transparent and solid is all the same).

 * Under Cocoa, all panels are transparent, allowing a frame's texture
   (if any) to show through.

Is there a Gtk theme where frame content and/or panels can be textured
(as opposed to being all the same color), so that you can tell the
difference between an opaque panel and a transparent one? Or are you
talking about something else completely?