On 22 Sep 2019, at 11:15, Angelo Varlotta wrote:

If this could get fixed at some point, I'd be more than happy. Thank you

Some more experimentation and it’s even more problematic than suggested in my original email, because if we make the window transparent, as required to have one of the subviews draw with alpha on top of what’s behind the window, the content of that subview will affect the window’s shadow.

So effectively text drawn in the view gets a shadow, and worse, the shadow is not updated (unless programmatically requested), so changing the text will leave the shadow from the original text.

As mentioned, there is the option of placing a NSVisualEffectsView behind the text view, but this gives a (very) blurred background. I don’t know if the desire for alpha is to be able to read/see what’s behind, because in that case, NSVisualEffectsView is not a good option.

It might also be possible to simply capture the content behind the window and draw, but I have no idea about APIs for that and this is not something I plan to look into, but someone else is more than welcome to.