octo's guide to transparent terms

About this document

Originally this document was aimed at people using larswm, a minimalistic window manager which happends to be my favorite one. There are some issues with larswm and transparent terms which are very strange andi, to the time of this writing, unresolved. I would love to link to the discussion on the mailinglist, but unfortunately it is now hosted by yahoo and they are somehow weird about not letting other users read the list emails and stuff. However, I am now convinced that the problems are unlikely to be caused by larswm so I changed this page to be a bit more general and well, here it is.

This document focuses on aterm which happends to be my favorite terminal emulator (erm, yes, I do get a but personal about software every now and then ;). Another reason would be that it is based on rxvt, just like eterm and wterm, so the configuration of these four is very similar. So if you don't like aterm for whatever reason this site may still be usefull for you.

A sample configuration

The propably best way to configure aterm is via the ~/.Xdefaults or ~/.Xresources file. aterm accepts two classnames for it's configuration: ATerm and XTerm. The following is a simple configuration for people who want to get started fast. A list of some more available resources is below.


aterm*foreground:
white

aterm*background:
black

aterm*cursorColor:
darkgray

aterm*transparent:
true

aterm*shading:
30

aterm*font:
fixed

With the options listed above you will get a terminal with black background which is 30% transparent, with a white foreground. The font "fixed" is xterm's default which I personally like best.

Other resources

The following list if very incomplete! For the complete list of all resources available please read aterm's manpage.

transparent: bool
Turns the transparency mode on or off. Since this paper describes how to get a transparent term you will most likely want to set this to true.
tinting: color
Specifies the color used for background-tinting and turns it on (background-tinting that is). Apparently it can be a lot faster and is more customizable than "true" tinting (everything that's not this and still transparent ;) but it also doesn;t work with larswm. So if you are having problems using this set the tintingType (see below) to true. For this to work you should activate transparent and deactivate shading.
tintingType: type
Sets the type of tinting used. If this is set to true then fast tinting will not be used. If shading or a background image is used the type true will always be used.
textType: type
Same as tintingType, but applied to text.
shading: amount
If set to an amount between 0 and 100 the background image will be darkened, any value outside this range will brighten the image. A value of 100 will not change the background at all. This options forces tintingType to be true.

Links for further reference

the official aterm homepage (http://aterm.sourceforge.net/)
home of rxvt (http://www.rxvt.org/)
the eterm homepage (http://www.eterm.org/)
the home of wterm (http://largo.windowmaker.org/files.php)

This document was written 2002 by Florian Forster <octopus at verplant dot org>
You are welcome to redistribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
Last update: 2002-10-31 11:45 (GMT+1)
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