So I want to create a terminal with a background image. Only I don’t want this image to be my wallpaper. I want it to only show the portion of the image that the terminal window convers. As if it were a transparent terminal window of my wallpaper. The area within the box is the part of the image I want to see. However I want this image to only be viewable from the terminal window. So bigger picture my terminal is going to act as a sort of x-ray into the main scene being my wallpaper behind it. This is going to work in conjunction with some art I’m working on. I really have no idea what to use to try to start this. I am running arch so I can install basically anything. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Any questions I can answer as well.
Gnome Terminal removed support for doing that several releases ago. If you’re running a GTK-based desktop, XFCE’s terminal is a good option.
The package is called xfce4-terminal, and is in Arch’s community repo. To set the wallpaper, just go to:
Edit -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Background.
For Qt based desktops, Konsole supports this as well, but it’s stuck in an odd place in true KDE fasion.
Edit Profile -> Appearance -> Edit Color Scheme -> Background ImageTilix does at least part of this. In the settings you can give it a separate image to act as the background, instead of actual transparency.
But the options are to scale the image, center it, or tile it. So if you choose center, or tile, you’ll always see the same piece of the image as you move the window around, but if you change the size of the window you see more or less of it. You don’t quite get the effect you’d get with real transparency on a real desktop where moving the window changes what it sees of the background.
Yeah lol I know. This is a bit more complicated than a simple wallpaper. However, I did find this idk if it will help but I’m going to play around with it. http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/urxvt-background.1.html
This actually looks like more than I realistically hoped to achieve. Not necessarily everything I wanted you’re right but definitely a great starting point.
eterm used to do this?
edit:
yup, from the eterm man page
-P pic, --background-pixmap pic
Use pic as the background image. pic can be in any format that Imlib understands. Currently this means just about anything, including JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, PPM, etc. The image is tiled by default. To specify alternate geometry, follow the filename with an @ sign and the geometry string. Image geometry is specified as @wxh+x+y:ops where w and h are the horizontal/vertical scaling percentages, x and y are the horizontal/vertical alignment percentages, and ops is a colon-delimited list of operations: tiled (to tile the image), propscaled (for proportional scaling). Note that these operations can be combined for various effects.urxvt is a phenomenal terminal, but it only comes as a Lego set. 