There are two popular ways of configuring a Linux terminal to work transparently over a wallpaper, without any borders, menu bars or toolbars. This is very popular among developers because of it’s practical and coolness factor. I personally use it to view source-codes or get an interactive process status of my system with htop. Something like conky, but not quite.

The Easy Way

Tilda is a highly customizable Linux terminal window. the author is inspired by classical terminals featured in “first person shooter games, Quake, Doom and Half-Life to name a few, where the terminal has no border and is hidden from the desktop till a key or keys are pressed.“ In our example we will install it and give a basic terminal look like the picture above. You can download Tilda from it’s project page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tilda/, debian users can download it from the repo by apt-get. In Gnome you can locate it under Applications –> Accessories –> Tilda.

To Achieve our desired look we will need to edit the default configurations.

Under general tab, uncheck “Always on Top”.

Under Appearance you can edit the height and width to your liking, but make sure you check “Enable Transparency” and make the level of Transparency 100%.

Under Colors I chose “Green on Black”.

Under Scrooling, “Disabled”.

That’s all you need, to run Tilda go to Applications –> Accessories –> Tilda and you should see it right there. The reason it’s not what I use for my transparent terminal because this is an easy fix and not very stable and crashes quite often (at least for me), while I know others who are quite happy with Tilda.

( I changed the height and width to my preference in this picture )

Tomorrow, I will show you how to get the same effect with Devilspie. Which is more stable with wide range of options and configurations.