
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