macOS Make portion of desktop viewable at all times

[danthespaceman]

I'm looking for a way to make a portion of my desktop viewable at all times. I realize that it's easy to write a script that resizes windows to accommodate this, but I'm looking for something with this added twist:

Just like you can't drag a window behind the menu bar, I'd like to create an area on the left side of my screen, about 300 pixels wide, that windows cannot move over, leaving only that portion of the desktop viewable. When moving windows around, they would just bump into this invisible edge just as they do with the menu bar.

I'm not entirely sure if this can be done in AppleScript, but I figured it would be a good place to start. For those wondering, I have a Geektools sidebar on my desktop that I would always like visible to me at all times.

 

[ranguvar]

I don't know if that's possible without hacking inside the foundations...

But: With Cocoa, you can make layered screenshots. You could make an app that is always on top of the window stack and that takes screenshots of the desktop under it. The app could display that screenshot. This is a very ugly hack, though. Plus, I don't know how you'd deal with event handling etc.....