How Do I Shrink the Visible Area of the X11 Root Window

I've had a similar problem with awesome window manager as well as urxvt, when ImageMagick was used to set the background. It got quickly resolved with feedback from the author of awesome - you can see the archive of this conversation on gmane archives - here and further on here.

The solution was to change the background setter and I chose to use habak because it was the lightest one. You can also use other, like feh or Esetroot (belongs to Enlightenment WM). I think I would recommend you to try feh first, since it seems to be packaged for many distros.

Side note: In case someone wanted to try out many different bg-setters, here's a list of those that awsetbg (bg-setting wrapper script from awesome) tries to use:

Esetroot habak feh hsetroot chbg fvwm-root imlibsetroot display qiv xv xsri xli xsetbg wmsetbg xsetroot

Note that some of those only come shipped with bigger packages.

Edit: Looking at xsri manpage, I think it might provide best flexibility for your needs.

As far as I know (but I'm no X expert), visibility is only tracked through VisibilityNotify events, it isn't a state that you can query like IsViewable. You'd need to get KDE to spit it out, I don't know if it can do that.

You may be solve your problem by sending the window a VisibilityNotify(state=VisibilityUnobscured) event. I don't know if that's enough, you may also need to send a MapNotify event. Here's some untested Python code to send a VisibilityNotify event.

#! /usr/bin/env python
import re, sys, time
import Xlib.X, Xlib.XK, Xlib.display, Xlib.protocol

def parse_action(string):
    state = {
              '0': 0,
              '1': 1,
              '2': 2,
              'unobscured': 0,
              'partiallyobscured': 1,
              'fullyobscured': 2,
              'visibilityunobscured': 0,
              'visibilitypartiallyobscured': 1,
              'visibilityfullyobscured': 2,
             }[string.lower()]
    return state

def parse_window(display, arg):
    wid = int(arg, 0)
    return display.create_resource_object('window', wid)

def send_event(display, window, state):
    window.send_event(Xlib.protocol.event.VisibilityNotify(window=window,
                                                           state=state))
    display.sync()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    display = Xlib.display.Display()
    send_event(display, parse_window(display, sys.argv[1]), parse_action(sys.argv[2]))