Linux Desktop Hacks

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Chapter 7, Terminal Empowerment

#51 Ultimate Terminal Transparency

HACK

HACK

#51

Ultimate Terminal Transparency Hack #51

You want a lightweight terminal, but you want it to look cool.

You can set a number of terminal programs to have their own graphics back-

grounds or to be “transparent,” so that your wallpaper shows through,

which really makes the terminal look good. Transparency seems to be the

trendy look these days.

The only problem with true transparency is that you need to stick with

monochromatic wallpaper for it to work. If you have wallpaper with both

bright and dark patterns, you’re in trouble (Figure 7-1). It doesn’t matter if

you set your text color to black or white. Depending on where the text

shows up on your colorful wallpaper, you’ll be able to read some text, and

other text will blend into the background and disappear.

Sure, Figure 7-1 looks pretty, but one could go blind trying to read the text.

Heavyweight programs such as KDE Konsole or a GNOME terminal solve

this problem nicely. But it seems counterproductive to run a lightweight

window manager only to load heavyweight terminals just to get a cool tinted

transparency. Xorg (a fork of the XFree86 X Windows project) has experi-

mental transparency features

[Hack #34] that will solve this problem for all ter-

minals, but it is currently unstable. Until Xorg works out the bugs, aterm,

urxvt, and some settings in .Xdefaults come ...