Transparent terminals in i3wm

Operating Systems, Editors, and Tools
1

I was browsing around some of the Linux customizations on Reddit and wanted to see how transparent terminals look on my desktop with i3.

For anyone who wants to try it:

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install compton

Put this in ~/.config/compton.conf:

opacity-rule = ["85:class_g = 'Gnome-terminal'"];

(or whatever programs you want to make transparent – see this page)

I put this in my i3conf file (seen here):

# for transparency
exec --no-startup-id compton

I’m not sure if it will work until I restart my computer, so I ran compton in another terminal:

$ compton &

and it worked. I kind of like it, but don’t know if it will be too distracting in the long term.

compton-i3
compton-i31920×1080 510 KB

transparent-terminal-i3
transparent-terminal-i31920×1080 517 KB

Related discussion: [POLL] What Terminal Do You Use? (Linux)

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2

When it comes to eye candy I believe less is more. I set the opacity between 80 and 90% when i used Compiz with XFCE in the past. I think Compton is much lighter on resources than Compiz.

It looks good.

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3

It has been working out. I use my desktop background switching script to rotate the backgrounds until I find one that works well.

4

It lasted about 2 months. I just turned off the transparency, because sometimes it got harder to read the code, especially when I switched to tabbed windows (alt-w in my configuration) and there was another text file behind the terminal. :disappointed:

5

Too much eye candy is distracting.

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