If you have the developer tools, you can
open up the file
Library:Preferences:com.apple.Terminal.
plist in your home directory with the
PropertyListEditor. Then do what looks
natural. :)

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Good news! With the Public Beta, this trick would make the whole window transparent,
including the title bar and scroll bars. With the 4K17 (MacWorld) build, this is fixed so the title
bar and scroll bars are always 100% opaque.

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I tried this on my release verion install of OS X.

It was buggy as hell.

This screenshot (1152x768, ~160K) shows that yes, I have a pretty transparent terminal window but that it's also got lots of "ghost" text - when my text scrolled up, it left little shadows behind. I've noticed this on several different machines, with different color schemes.

I'd be all over transparent terminals if this didn't happen...

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Very odd - I get nothing like that, even at 50%+ transparency -- what video card do you have, and how much transparency?

-rob.

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I cranked it up to 100% transparency, and it's the ATI Rage Mobility (I think :) that's in my Powerbook G4. :)

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I get the same thing in my PowerBook G3 Bronze (ATI Rage) at anything less then about 90%.

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I get the ghosted text only if I resize the terminal window - and then whatever text is displayed at that moment leaves a ghost. If I don't resize, there's no ghost effect. (nvidia geforce4 mx in a dual 1G with a 22" cinema).

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I haven't installed the developers tools cd -- not much room on my hard drive & I've read horror stories about it taking hours & hours only to not work in the end. On my system, my /System/Library/Preferences directory doesn't seem to have anything about the terminal, though I do have a ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist file. My understanding is that this "defaults" command is a tool for editing the XML configuration files, yes?

Assuming that is the case, I'm poking around the plist file but I don't see anything useful about opacity. I *do* see how to override your default shell (hmm, I've been meaning to learn zsh...), but that's for later.

Do you need to have something like the devel tools disc installed to mess around with terminal transparency settings, or am I just not looking in the right places?

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Yes, just type the command at the terminal...

Also, you can change the shell in the prefs for the terminal; no mucking about in files required!

-rob.

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Ahh, of course. And of course I didn't actually try running the command to see what would happen... :)

Oh well, cool trick, I definitely like this. Thanks!

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Try the program Tinkertool.

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I find it quite annoying that the scrollbars cannot be "transparent-ized" even if Terminal is set to 100% transparency. It's pretty ugly to have nothing but a scrollbar and titlebar hanging in mid-air. If this was implemented in the Public Beta, is there a way to get it back?

Specifically, I would like the option to completely hide the scrollbar and titlebar...Xterm on X11 (Linux/UNIX) has this capability and its pretty slick. You can even scroll through text just without the scrollbar. Real nice when you just want to have a term sitting in the background...

Also, I too have experieced the "ghosting" effect. Pretty cool when the text is static, but when something like top is running, it makes it really hard to read...

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I attempted to use this hack on the terminal in MacOS 10.2. DON'T DO THIS!!! (you can change the transparency in the Windows Settings item in the Terminal menu. Select "colors" and set the transparency from there.

The terminal became transparent, but as soon as I tried to open another terminal window, it caused a major screen redraw error: the bottom half of my screen went black, and displayed weird colorful barcode like patterns. When I opened new windows and resized the dock, or did anything that involved screen redrawing, the part of the screen that was redrawn went back to normal.

I couldn't find anything that would fix it at first, so I reinstalled my whole system using the "archive and reinstall" option on the MacOS 10.2 disks. Reinstalling didn't do anything!

Finally, my friend found out the trick that worked from a FAQ written by Bob Levitus. Go to your home directory, and from there go to your library/preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist. Move "com.apple.Terminal.plist" to the trash, log out, log in, and start the Terminal again. It will rebuild the preference list for the terminal, and all will be well again.


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i have 10.2.2 (or 10.2.3 devp.) and this does not make it crash. maybe they have fixed it with .2 update.

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