Fellas, I’m at my wit’s end with this one. I’m trying to set a general rule for window opacity in sway, and then have a few programs excepted from it.

Back on i3 with picom, I could do this pretty easily by setting activeOpacity to 0.9, for example, and then specifying additional opacityRules like this:

"100:class_g = 'mpv'"
"100:class_g = 'Brave-browser'"

Likewise, hyprland’s window rules made it pretty easy to override the general opacity rules as well.

I can’t seem to get this on sway, though; if I set it up like this:

[app_id=".*"] opacity 0.85

[app_id="brave-browser"] opacity set 1
[app_id="librewolf"] opacity 1

it simply sets everything to 0.85.

Currently, I have this:

[app_id="^(?!mpv$|brave-browser$).*$"] opacity 0.85

[app_id="brave-browser"] opacity set 1
[app_id="mpv"] opacity 1

but it is still exhibiting the same behavior (except mpv also seems to totally disregard any opacity rules whatsoever).

Any help is greatly appreciated—I haven’t been able to find anyone else asking or talking about what seems to me like pretty basic functionality.

UPDATE:

Months later, I have it working—it seems my regex was incorrect. Indeed, you cannot apply opacity rules twice (once with a wildcard, and again for specific windows after), so the way to do it is with a regex like this:

for_window {
  [app_id="^(?!brave-browser$)(?!mpv$).*"] opacity 0.8
}