Making block-out-from more configurable? Focus ring, color choices, optional text, etc.

[nickjj]

niri is already unlocking nice things for screen sharing like the ability to block out specific windows.

Currently you get a 100% opacity black background color that's shown instead of the window's true content.

Here's a few things I've been thinking about:

Focus ring

I'd like to propose being able to set a custom ring color which is shown the same way for both the presenter and viewers.

• As a presenter, this is handy because it lets you know this window is being blocked
• As a viewer, this is handy because it lets you know the presenter has this blocked window focused and is doing something there

This is especially more important if we ever get a way to toggle block-out-from on the currently focused window as a feature.

We already have a way to set window-rule on screencasted windows:

window-rule {
    match is-window-cast-target=true

    focus-ring {
        active-gradient from="#f38ba8ee" to="#cc241dee" angle=45
    }
}

It could be introduced with a new match is-window-blocked=true match rule. This way folks could even do other things like add shadows or whatever they want if they don't prefer focus rings. It also lets you individually configure both casted and blocked windows separately.

Background color

Right now it's black and that's fine, it makes sense for redacted things to be black but it would be nice to be able to configure it to a different color so you can have it match your theme's look and feel.

You can already do neat things like setting the opacity on the rule itself but this also affects the window when it's not being blocked. For example setting 0% opacity to make the blocked content transparent is kind of cool but that's not really viable because it also makes it transparent for the real window which means you can't see it as the presenter.

Optional text

When creating movies, a common phrase is "show, don't tell".

If you're doing live streams and you have a redacted window, it's not always clear on why it's black for someone without any context if they are just joining in. If you're up on stage giving a live demo / talk, it takes up highly valuable and limited time to have to explain it.

It would be potentially useful if you could add an optional property to put in a custom redacted message. It could be displayed in the center (X/Y) of the window and wrap to fit the size of the window dimensions. I know this could get complicated with font sizes unless it also dynamically scaled the font.

Importance?

If it came down to priorities, personally I think the focus ring is the most valuable of the 3 enhancements because it helps the presenter gain information on what's blocked or not at a glance. The other 2 are nice to haves, I don't know how the background color is set but maybe that's the easiest one to implement?

All 3 things could maybe be introduced as new config properties that apply to all block-out-from calls? This way it's defined once but used in all rules.

What do you think?

[YaLTeR]

I'd go with something simple first. Would also be good to see how it works on other systems and in similar applications. Something that is the same for presenter and viewer is also good because it's easy to test visually. And, well, a big question is how to design this in the config (allowing the possibility for future extensibility but not going overboard with it).

[YaLTeR]

Something that occurred to me is that if we do this through window rules, and then you have some custom shader for it, then on the screencast itself you will still get the custom shader, applied to the black rectangle. Which is not necessarily what you want in this specific case. But this is kinda how I expect window rules to work. One more argument towards a separate config block for blocked-out display I suppose

[nickjj]

What type of options were you thinking of including in the config block for block-out?

If window-rules isn't used would you expose all of the possible styles (focus ring, shadow, opacity, dim [in the future], etc.) in this new block or something else?

[YaLTeR]

Stuff that doesn't affect layout (so no border, no min/max width, etc.)

[nickjj]

Sounds good. Is focus ring going to be allowed? I know it's different than a border but I don't know if it's considered something that affects your layout.

[YaLTeR]

Yes.

I don't know if it's considered something that affects your layout.

Affects layout means changes window sizes. Adding borders shrinks the window. Focus ring doesn't