README
Blur Cinnamon
A Cinnamon extension to Blur, Dim, Colorize, Desaturate and make transparent parts of the Cinnamon Desktop.
Cinnamon components you can apply effects to (currently):
- The Overview
- The Expo
- The Panels
- Applet popup menus (i.e Menu menu, Calendar, etc.) (#)
- The Desktop background image (#)
- Desktop Notification popups (#)
- The panel tooltip popups (#)
- The Coverflow and Timeline 3D Alt-Tab switchers (not the Cinnamon default Alt-Tab switcher!)
- Application window backgrounds (#)
- Desklet backgrounds (#)
(#) Note: The Blur Cinnamon effects for the (#) marked Cinnamon components above are disabled by default. They can be enabled in the Blur Cinnamon configuration window. Some effects will override your theme settings to force transparency.
Blurring can also be disabled if you just want a transparent or semi-transparent effect without blurring for Panels, Applet popup menu or the Expo.
A traditional transparent effect (where you can seen more than just the desktop background) is possible for Panels/Menus/Notifications/Toolips but no saturation or blurring effects are possible in this mode. You must enable the "Use unique effect settings" option and then change the "Type of background effect" to "Transparent".
Features
- Gaussian blur algorithm (borrowed from the Gnome extension Blur-my-Shell) with a user configurable intensity
- Simple blur algorithm (the Cinnamon built-in algorithm) which I would only recommend for very old computers
- Dimming overlay with user configurable color and intensity (fully-transparent to a solid color)
- Makes the components transparent (when needed) so that the desktop background image effects are visible
- Allows you to adjust the color saturation of the Cinnamon components. You can reduced saturation all the way down to gray scale
- Uses a rounded corner effect to match your themes rounded corner settings, and provides manual rounded corner setting for application window effects so you can match the rounded corner of the application windows you choose to blur. This does NOT round window corners, it only allows the blurred background to match the rounding of it's window
- Ability to changes the opacity of application windows so application window blur effects are visible under the window
- Option to add a backlight effect to the focused window using a background image blur effect spilling over the focused windows borders
- You can use general settings across all Cinnamon components or use unique settings for each component type
- Allows you to apply custom CSS code to panels to achieve a number of custom panel effects like rounded corners, borders, changing the panel width, etc. Careful though, you can mess up your panels, but remember everything will go back to normal if you simply remove any Custom CSS settings you added to Blur Cinnamon.
Requirements
This extension requires Cinnamon 6.0 or better (i.e Mint 21.3 or better).
If you have installed any of the following Cinnamon extensions, you should disable them before enabling Blur Cinnamon:
- Transparent panels
- Transparent panels reloaded
- Blur Overview
Using any of the above with Blur Cinnamon may have some odd side effects that would require a Cinnamon restart to resolve.
Limitations
- The Applet popup menu effects are intended to be used with the Cinnamon (6.4) theme or the Mint-Y dark desktop themes. The effects might work will with some other themes but I have not tested them so the effects might not work out just right. You can try the Mint-Y light themes but it might be hard to read the menu items without some playing around with the settings and the background image. Blur Cinnamon Popup-menu effects are disabled by default.
- The Applet popup-menu effects works for all the applets that I have tested except "Cinnamenu". Cinnamenu is preventing other code from receiving the "open-state-changed" event which Blur Cinnamon uses to know when to apply popup-menu theme setting and when to resize and show the blur background element. This issue is fixed in the latest Cinnamenu from Fredcw GitHub but you will need to manually fix the current Cinnamon Spices version of Cinnamenu (see here)
- Currently Blur Cinnamon uses "Static Blurring", meaning only a blurred copy of the desktop background image is visible below effected components (i.e Panels, Menus, Tooltips and Windows). I am looking for a way to implement "Dynamic Blurring" but so far I have not been successful.
- This extension currently does not work under Wayland, it only works under X11. The extension automatically detects Wayland and disables most of the features of the extension.
Installation
- Right click on the cinnamon panel and click "System Settings"
- Click on the "Extensions" icon under the "Preferences" category
- Click the "Download" tab and then click the "Blur Cinnamon" entry
- Click the "Install" button on the right and then return to the "Manage" tab
- Select the new "Blur Cinnamon" entry and then click the "+" button at the bottom of the window
- Use the "gears" icon next to the "Blur Cinnamon" entry to open the setting window and setup the preferred behavior
Custom Panel CSS Examples:
The following examples of CSS code can be applied to panels to achieve a custom panel effect.
| Effect | Custom CSS string |
|---|---|
| Grey borders (all around) | border-width: 1px; border-color: rgb(70,70,70); |
| Gray top only border | border-top: 1px; border-color: rgb(70,70,70); |
| Grey bottom only border | border-bottom: 1px; border-color: rgb(70,70,70); |
| Shrink a horizontal panel width | margin-left: 100px; margin-right: 100px; |
| Shrink a vertical panel height | margin-top: 100px; margin-bottom: 100px; |
| Rounded the corners of a panel | border-radius: 20px; |
| Padding for horizontal panels | padding-left: 10px; padding-right: 10px; |
| Padding for vertical panels | padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; |
You can combine and modify the above as desired and add the result to the "Custom CSS" entry within the panels table under the Panels settings. The "Use unique effect settings for the Panels" and the "Enable advanced options to apply unique settings for each panel" options must to be enabled see the panels table. Edit/add the appropriate table entry for the panel you wish to effect then modify the "Custom CSS" entry. Typos and syntax errors will typically result in the panel effects reverting to default, but other issue could result. You can always undue your effects by deleting the contents of the "Custom CSS" field in the table. Not all CSS options will work, it's limited to the CSS that is supported by Cinnamon and further limited by hard-coded settings used by the Cinnamon panels code.
Here is the CSS setting I use on my bottom panel to get a centered panel with rounded corners and a grey border:
padding-left: 10px; padding-right: 10px; border-radius: 20px; border-width: 1px; border-color: rgb(40,40,40); margin-left: 200px; margin-right: 200px;The border radius rounds the corners, the padding adds space on each end of the panel to accommodate the rounded corners better, and the margins shrink the panel so that it does not fill the width of the screen resulting in a centered panel.
Feedback
Please leave a comment here on cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com or you can create an issue on my Github to give me feedback, make a suggestion or to report any issues you find.
If you like this Cinnamon extension, please give it a "star" here any maybe on my Github repository as well to encourage me to continue working on the project. Thanks!
Credits
Some code was borrowed from the BlurOverview Extension by nailfarmer.
The Gaussian and rounded corner effect code was borrowed from the Gnome Blur my shell extension by Aurélien Hamy.
The Blur Cinnamon icon was generated by Google Gemini
Log In To Comment!
72 Comments