How to Make Window Transparent in Osx Swift

How can I create a window with transparent background with swift on osx?

NSWindow has a property 'opaque' which it is true by default.

The value of this property is true when the window is opaque;
otherwise, false.

Just change it to false:

override func viewWillAppear() {
    super.viewWillAppear()
    view.window?.opaque = false
    view.window?.backgroundColor = NSColor(red: 1, green: 0.5, blue: 0.5, alpha: 0.5)
}

Swift 4 update: opaque has been renamed isOpaque

override func viewWillAppear() {
    super.viewWillAppear()
    view.window?.isOpaque = false
    view.window?.backgroundColor = NSColor(red: 1, green: 0.5, blue: 0.5, alpha: 0.5) 
}

How to make window transparent in osx swift?

You can get an instance of your application window as follow:

guard let window = NSApplication.shared().windows.first else { return }
window.isOpaque = false
window.backgroundColor = .clear

Get your window from NSApp (global constant for the shared app instance):

guard let window = NSApp.windows.first else { return }

Or override viewWillAppear or viewDidAppear and access your view's window property.

override func viewWillAppear() {
    super.viewWillAppear()
    view.window?.isOpaque = false
    view.window?.backgroundColor = .clear
}

Making the title bar of a window completely transparent

The problem is that inside viewDidLoad method the window property is always nil. All the optional chaining in your code just fails silently. You just need to move your code to viewWillAppear method.

override func viewWillAppear() {
    super.viewWillAppear()

    // configure your window properties here
}

Swift - Cocoa - Change window color?

Ok, so I am assuming you are using Storyboards here (because otherwise the template Xcode creates would have given you a window property in the AppDelegate and you'd probably would have successfully tried setting the background color on that).

There are many options how to do this but basically you would use an NSWindow subclass or an NSWindowController subclass to be responsible for setting the windows appearance (for those properties that can not be set in Interface Builder at least)

NSWindow subclass:

class BlackWindow: NSWindow {
    override init(contentRect: NSRect, styleMask style: NSWindow.StyleMask, backing backingStoreType: NSWindow.BackingStoreType, defer flag: Bool) {
        super.init(contentRect: contentRect, styleMask: style, backing: backingStoreType, defer: flag)
        backgroundColor = .black
    }
}

and set this subclass as the class in the storyboard.

NSWindowController subclass:

class BlackWindowController: NSWindowController {
    override func windowDidLoad() {
        super.windowDidLoad()
        window?.backgroundColor = .black
        window?.titlebarAppearsTransparent = true
    }
}

and again set the class in the storyboard. There are many variants of where you can modify your window in the window controller, windowDidLoad() is just one suggestion.

Hope this helps.

Passing Click Through Transparent Window

Setting IgnoresMouseEvents to YES should do the trick..

• (void)setIgnoresMouseEvents:(BOOL)ignoreMouseEvents

Specifies whether the window is transparent to mouse clicks and other mouse events, allowing overlay windows.

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Reference/ApplicationKit/Classes/NSWindow_Class/Reference/Reference.html#//apple_ref/occ/instm/NSWindow/setIgnoresMouseEvents:

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