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Cool Transparencies
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m_niessner
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Mar 27, 2001, 02:15 AM
 
About a month ago, I was looking at some sites where people had customized the transparencies of windows. Especially the terminal. How was this done. I saw things like green text on a black terminal with 70% transparency. I was wondering if someone knew how to customize the terminal like that.
     
Big Red
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Mar 27, 2001, 03:11 AM
 
The easiest way is to head over to versiontracker and look up TinkerTool. There are options there.
     
SpiffyGuyC
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Mar 27, 2001, 09:32 AM
 
Alrighty, here we go . . . read carefully, and there should be no problems here but I just wanna get it in writing that I am not responsible for whatever you do to your system and any catastrophic results thereof. That said . . .

The colors are in the preferences for the terminal app. You can change your text, your background, highlight, etc. etc. etc.. So you do that first.

Note that to see any change applied, you will need to close your current terminal window and open a new one.

In the terminal, type (without quotations) "defaults write com.apple.terminal TerminalOpaqueness .8". Where I have ".8" you can enter any value from 1 (opaque) to 0 (completely transparent). I found that .8 works very nicely.

That's all from memory - I'm not in X now to test - but it should work without a hitch.

Enjoy your cool terminal! I did this to mine too just because it looked so slick - I hardly spend any time in the terminal, hehe.

-S

[EDIT] I want to add that again, to see that the terminal has turned itself translucent, you will need to close the current window and open a new terminal window.

[This message has been edited by SpiffyGuyC (edited 03-27-2001).]
     
robo from A.I.
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Mar 27, 2001, 10:37 AM
 
I saw a screenshot of a translucent terminal window with the text itself casting a shadow on the window behind the terminal. was this a fake, or is there a way to do this?

thanks,


-robo
     
Eugene
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Mar 27, 2001, 06:11 PM
 
It only casts a visible shadow when you put the window in the background. To accentuate the effect, make your terminal almost completely transparent and set your font really large.
     
cteselle
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Mar 27, 2001, 06:51 PM
 
Originally posted by Big Red:
The easiest way is to head over to versiontracker and look up TinkerTool. There are options there.
The link is dead at VersionTracker. Anyone have an alternate d/l location?

------------------
Promote Chicken Randomness
     
John C
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Mar 30, 2001, 08:33 AM
 
I don't know if anyone else has seen this yet, but there is a section in the terminal definitions that allows for transparency. So now each terminal window can have a different amount of transparency.

Just look for the following lines:
<key>TerminalOpaqueness</key>
<real>7.900000e-01</real>

Change the number to what you want.

John C
     
Petter
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Mar 30, 2001, 09:10 AM
 
There's three different apps that does a lot of nice things...

TinkerTool
Docking Maneuvers
Plus

get them at versiontracker!

Petter

[This message has been edited by Petter (edited 03-30-2001).]
Petter

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rabbittb
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Mar 30, 2001, 11:50 AM
 
When transparency is turned on the text in the terminal does seem to have a shadow. The problem with this is that if you turn transparancy all the way up i.e. 0 the "shadow text" remains as you continue to type. After a while it becomes very difficult to read text in the terminal. I think Apple needs to somehow turn off any type of shadow effect within the terminal. Other than that transparency rules and makes all my Linux friends jealous.
     
macanada
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Mar 30, 2001, 01:19 PM
 
It seems that Opaqueness setting only applies to Terminals.

Is there a way to do the same for the rest of the windows like Finder and Apps? Probably not, but worth asking.

Chad Taylor
Chad Taylor
     
tz3gm
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Mar 30, 2001, 01:39 PM
 
nope finder windows can't be transparent....at least to my knowledge....
     
dreness
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Mar 30, 2001, 01:55 PM
 
The problem with the drop shadows cast by text onto whatever is behind a translucent / transparent terminal.app window is that it does not refresh until you activate / deactivate that terminal window. I'd guess that this will be fixed.

One very interesting thing about 100% transparent terminal windows is that the background is not rendered at all, meaning that it's not even there. To demonstrate, check out the following shot I posted to resexcellence:
http://www.resexcellence.com/snapsho...01_Andre.shtml

The two terms shown are both 100% transparent. I can click directly through the bottom right window (tcpdump) to get at itunes or granet. Very cool The only way to grab 100% transparent windows is by the titlebar (or scrollbars... btw, anybody know how to hack out the scrollbars alltogether?).

Check out another interesting shot that really shows off how well transparencies are handled: http://spud.dreness.com/~andre/bits/layers.jpg

peash
-dre^
     
John C
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Mar 30, 2001, 03:19 PM
 
To get rid of the scroll bars, turn off the scrollback buffer.
Too cool...

John C
     
RAILhead
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Mar 30, 2001, 03:29 PM
 
Are y'all mucking with the Terminal app via the Property List Editor? I've looked all through Terminal's resources for "Terminal Opaqueness" and can't find a thing. Mind you, I've changed transparency via command-line, but I'm wondering how to actually modify the app itself.

Do you use PLEditor?

TIA.
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