[SOLVED] Translucent Blurry Terminal Background

[KitchiRUs]

Hi all,

I've recently been experimenting with some eye-candy for my F16 XFCE OS. I realized that terminal could be made to be translucent. But the problem with that is the background is still in focus, so if the terminal is over some text it gets hard to read.

I know the obvious solution to this would be to turn transparency off. But I like it this way. :P
Is there a way to make whatever it is behind the terminal blurry? (a la Mac OS X)

[sea]

In Gnome-Terminal and LXTerminal there's a slider in the settings panel, with which you can dim the transparent factor.
Personaly, i favor an level of 80% visablity, which means 20% of the background show through.
This giving me enough transparence to see whats in the background, and enough read-ability to read the foreground.

EDIT:
Not aware of any function that would blur the background of a terminal.

[KitchiRUs]

Sea,

Yeah... I'm running gnome-terminal, with transparency set to about 80% or thereabouts. It'd be really nice (and much more flashy :P) if the background could be blurred.

[ah7013]

You can make Konsole blurry by running this command in a Konsole session:

xprop -f _KDE_NET_WM_BLUR_BEHIND_REGION 32c -set _KDE_NET_WM_BLUR_BEHIND_REGION 0 -id $(xprop -root | awk '/_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW\(WINDOW\)/{print $NF}')

I have attached a screenshot of a blurry konsole

However I think that it uses KWin's Blur plugin so even if you install Konsole in a different DE/WM it may not work but I haven't tried.

[KitchiRUs]

Thanks for that!

But I'm running gnome-terminal. Do you know of a similar command for gnome-terminal? This one obviously didn't work for that.

[Gareth Jones]

Last time I messed with transparency, the only way to do it was to use a compositing window manager like Compiz, which has a setting to blur translucent windows. I think it's a weakness in the XComposite extension that windows can only set an alpha value for a pixel, not a blur value, so the window manager has to either blur all translucent windows based on alpha values, or none, or add an extension of its own so that programs can request blurring. (This is presumably what KWin/Konsole does.) Unless/until this is standardized though, it'd only work with the right combination of terminal and window manager.

[KitchiRUs]

Gareth,

In gnome-terminal, there is an option for transparency inbuilt. But like you say, I don't think XFCE in itself allows for both transparency and blurring.
I've been looking around a bit, and I'm going to try messing with compiz+XFCE. Copmiz has a setting for blurring translucent windows.
If I get working settings I shall post back here.

[Gareth Jones]

Originally Posted by KitchiRUs

In gnome-terminal, there is an option for transparency inbuilt. But like you say, I don't think XFCE in itself allows for both transparency and blurring.

Yes, this just changes the terminal's alpha channel (translucency). There isn't a standard way of setting blurring.

Copmiz has a setting for blurring translucent windows.

That's what I used, it certainly used to work.

[KitchiRUs]

So I finally managed to do it.

I installed compiz, ccsm *and* compiz-gtk (your window borders won't show up until you install compiz-gtk and give the path of the gtk-binary in the Window Borders option in ccsm).

Under the "Blur Windows" section of ccsm, change blur filter to Gaussian, and then mess with the sliders to your satisfaction. And to selectively only blur terminal, Click on the + next to "Alpha blur windows" and "grab" terminal.

Works for me!

Thanks for all the help, everyone!