Window opacity

fman's window can be made see-through from the command palette. The change applies immediately and is remembered across restarts.

Usage

1. Press Ctrl+Shift+P and run Set window opacity.
2. The list offers Theme default, then 100% down to 70% in 5% steps. The value in use is preselected and marked current.
3. Pick one. The window fades right away.

Theme default drops your choice again and lets the active theme decide. That is the way back — not 100%, which pins the window opaque under every theme, including one that ships translucent.

Transparency, opacity, alpha and translucent find the command in the palette too. It has no default key binding; bind one like any other command:

{ "keys": ["Ctrl+Alt+O"], "command": "set_window_opacity" }

Notes

• The whole window fades, text included. fman does not do background-only translucency.
• Only the main window fades. The command palette, prompts, alerts and progress dialogs are separate windows and stay fully opaque, so whatever you are reading or typing into never gets harder to read than the file list behind it.
• The picker stops at 70% because below that the file list gets hard to read against whatever is behind it. The underlying setting goes down to 0.3 if you bind your own command.
• Your setting beats the theme's. Once you pick a value it survives every theme switch, including to a theme that asks for its own opacity — such as Matrix. Theme default hands control back.
• A file viewer that is already open fades with the window. It is part of the window, unlike the color case, where an open viewer keeps its old colors after a theme switch.

On Windows, another tool can undo it

The fade lives in a Windows window style flag. A window manager that overwrites that style instead of adding to it — a common line in AutoHotkey maximize or resize scripts — drops the flag and the window turns opaque again. fman does not notice, so it still reports the old value. Pick the value again from the palette to bring the fade back, or fix the script.