Just putting this idea out there since I don't think it's entirely feasible with Rainmeter currently but one could add shadows that extend beyond the primary skin by using a second skin that auto aligns to it. Effectively creating a separate bounding box.While the second issue is more one that I can't foresee any mitigation for, since fundamentally afaik Rainmeter doesn't really have a way to treat visible areas around a skin separate from desired bounds (unlike say CSS' box model or Windows' windows with their shadows, etc), so whatever in the skin is physically consuming dimensions becomes part of the skin's snappable point.
The issues with that would be:
- There's no way (afaict) to query Rainmeter for the skin's current dynamic Z index (such as occurs when two skins overlap and one is clicked, changing its Z index to overlap the other). Only the major static Z positions like On Desktop/Normal/Topmost can be changed. This has the upshot of the secondary shadow skin not having insight into how it should overlap when intersecting with (or being directly adjacent to, wrt to self-shadow overlap) other skins.
- Unclear how feasible moving both skins simultaneously and seamlessly would be. One mitigation could be for a skin to send the shadow skin info when its coordinates move and to hide it until movement has ended but without a proof of concept idk how well this would work in practice.
- Would require the secondary skin at least has Keep On Screen disabled to prevent misalignment at monitor edges. Can't recall if this setting is adjustable via code.
Statistics: Posted by Crest — 47 minutes ago