Linux Desktop Hacks

Ultimate Terminal Transparency #51

Chapter 7, Terminal Empowerment

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167

HACK

Tint Your urxvt

At least two relatively lightweight terminals—a Unicode version of rxvt,

called urxvt, and aterm—provide the ability to tint the transparent back-

ground. A project called mrxvt that lets you open multiple terminals in a sin-

gle window also offers this feature. But the mrxvt project is such a quickly

moving target I cannot recommend any settings until it matures further.

In the case of urxvt, the terminal will still be transparent so that it shows the

desktop wallpaper as its background. But urxvt can modify the background

by applying a colored tint to adjust the view of the desktop wallpaper. You

define the color of the tint and the level of shading of the tint, and you can

do it all in your .Xdefaults file

[Hack #50] so that you never have to remember

the command-line parameters. Starting with urxvt, here are the settings to

add to your ~/.Xdefaults file to get the results, as shown in Figure 7-2.

urxvt*inheritPixmap: True

urxvt*tintColor: green

urxvt*shading: 70

urxvt*fading: 70

The added green tint with a shading value of 70 makes a huge difference in

the legibility of the text, doesn’t it?

Here are two more tips: I find it very useful to set the term-

Name to rxvt. Some versions of Linux do not recognize urxvt

as a valid terminal type and therefore do not format text

properly. Also, urxvt has a resource