After I said that I wasn’t that bothered about transparency I found myself drawn towards this. I thought that the opaque text would make this more usable that plain transparency. I was packaging the Xfce4.4 beta, and compiled Terminal as part of this, and thought I’d add this hack to it. It worked OK, but you could only use a black terminal, and the alpha was hardcoded.
So I went out and found this which does the same thing for gnome-terminal, and so shares the backend with Terminal. I used the patch for libvte, and ported the changes to Terminal. It works quite well I think, and with Terminal’s ability to lose it’s own window decorations you could do some interesting things.
If anyone is interested in the full patch you can get the patch for Terminal here and I’ve updated the patch to work with the libvte shipped with Debian here.
So, the obligatory screenshot. Looks pretty unusable I know, and it is like that, but I wanted to show what could be done if you wanted.
