Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!yale!mintaka!bloom-beacon!SABER.COM!jimf
From: jimf@SABER.COM
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Changing color map
Message-ID: <9009211436.AA24020@armory>
Date: 21 Sep 90 14:36:03 GMT
Sender: root@athena.mit.edu (Wizard A. Root)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 34

|We are porting our application from Sun's Sunview window manager 
|to the IBM AIX RS6000, running Motif window manager.  We are trying
|to make an object "flash" by modifying the default color map.
[...]
|Sun's Sunview window manager would let us modify its color map, 
|so the flashing of every object simultaneously works.  But Motif
|window manager does not allow us to do that.  So we're looking for
|some X lib calls (other than modifying the server source code), or
|any other way that would let us modify the default color map, and
|continue to let us modify it even when we switch focus to other
|windows.  

How you would go about this depends on which graphics hardware is
installed on your RIOS.  It's pretty independent of which window
manager you're running.

Mine has the SGI-derived graphics board in it.  I think this is the
board you have since the lower-end board isn't color and only the
highest-end RIOS's have the really fast board.  The X server doesn't
take much advantage of this board except with respect to colormaps.
It allows a lot of private colormaps to be used simultaneously (I
think up to 16 256-color colormaps) without doing virtual colormap
swapping (which is what causes `technicolor' effects).  What I would
recommend that you do is allocate a private colormap and allocate your
color cells read-write.  You can then change the colors on the fly and
achieve the effect that you want.  (You can do this in the default
colormap, too, but I'm not sure what the size of the default colormap
is -- you should avoid allocating writable cells in it.)

Hope this helps,

jim frost
saber software
jimf@saber.com