Terminal: CTRL+Shift+Scroll should enable acrylic if it's not on already

[Tuumke]

When useAcrylic is turned off, ctrl+shift+scroll doesn't enable it. This stops people from adjusting their transparencies.

original text

• Your Windows build number: (Type ver at a Windows Command Prompt)
  Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.18362.86]
• What you're doing and what's happening: (Copy & paste specific commands and their output, or include screen shots)
  CTRL+Shift+Scroll in cmd.exe works fine with transparency/blurring
  CTRL+Shift+Scrol in Powershell.exe doesnt do a thing
• What's wrong / what should be happening instead:
  I was under the impression that it would work the same als the cmd.exe.

[ghvanderweg]

is "useAcrylic" set to "true" in the profile for PowerShell (in %localappdata%\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_8wekyb3d8bbwe\RoamingState\profiles.json)?

[Tuumke]

is "useAcrylic" set to "true" in the profile for PowerShell (in %localappdata%\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_8wekyb3d8bbwe\RoamingState\profiles.json)?

No it wasn't! Thanks so much. Love it so far! :)

[zadjii-msft]

Hmm. This is a good suggestion - if we're not using an acrylic background, the mouse wheel could change it into one.

This is possibly something that wouldn't be _too_ hard for someone to dip their toes into the codebase with. Take a look at the code in TermControl::_MouseTransparencyHandler. The trick is, for the case where we're not using acrylic in the settings, we'd need to set a new flag internally in the TermControl to indicate we've switched to acrylic mode.

[dkter]

I might be able to try this.

Per #593 acrylic is disabled on inactive windows, but should it be possible to enable transparency without the acrylic on inactive windows to make the difference less jarring?

[zadjii-msft]

See, we don't even know if there's a way to get non-acrylic transparency. If you could research that, that'd be even more appreciated. I'd think for the time being though, acrylic-backed transparency should be fine

[dkter]

Yeah, at the moment it seems like the only way to get native transparency is through acrylic. Oh well. Consistency, I guess.

[PhMajerus]

I knew my Win32 GDI skills could still be useful 😄

The Win32 way to achieve transparency and alpha blending is through layered windows (Win2K and later if I remember correctly):
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/winmsg/window-features#layered-windows

Try this for example:

LONG lExStyle = GetWindowLong(hWnd, GWL_EXSTYLE);
lExStyle |= WS_EX_LAYERED;
SetWindowLong(hWnd, GWL_EXSTYLE, lExStyle);
SetLayeredWindowAttributes(hWnd, RGB(0, 0, 0), 192, LWA_ALPHA);

I wouldn't recommend it for anything else than a very slight transparency though, since without the ability to blur the background, it would make the console harder to read.

[FoxInFlame]

I wouldn't recommend it for anything else than a very slight transparency though, since without the ability to blur the background, it would make the console harder to read.

Although, this is what has been done in previous CMDs until now afaik. I remember the window being quite hard to read when I lowered the opacity thinking it would blur the background and it didn't.

[DHowett-MSFT]

I think this is a duplicate of #603, actually.

[DHowett-MSFT]

Oh, I see. Okay. I'll repurpose this.

[Summon528]

I was playing around with this and was trying to switch the background to an acrylic brush on scroll. However, this makes me wonder why do we even need a useAcrylic option or a solid background brush since setting acrylicOpacity: 1 has the exact effect as useAcrylic: false