Shaded, transparent terminal emulators are pretty. While this is well known by the asthetes who use KDE, and other high-zoot, high-function desktops, I think that it is still true of those who like things a little simpler. I find it quicker to kick the tires of a unicycle. Still, I was looking to see if I could find a terminal emulator that was as fast as rxvt (which I switched to after debian-testing bungled the colours in the standard xterm) but allowed pretty shaded transparency.

I tried aterm, because it had little in the way of dependent libraries, but it didn’t refresh when the backdrop image did, which I found annoying. So, I tried eterm (pronounced, inexplicably, Eterm) and kicked it around for a while. I think I like it, based on this theme:

<Eterm-0.9.2>
begin color
    foreground white
    background black
    cursor #ffff00
    cursor_text #880000
    pointer white
    video normal
end color

begin attributes
    geometry 80x56
end attributes

begin imageclasses
    path "/usr/share/Eterm/pix/"
    begin image
        type background
        mode trans allow trans auto
        state normal
        cmod image 100
    end image
end imageclasses

begin toggles
    map_alert on
    visual_bell on
    login_shell true
    scrollbar off
    utmp_logging on
    iconic false
    home_on_output 1
    home_on_input 1
    scrollbar_right true
    scrollbar_floating false
    borderless false
end toggles

begin keyboard
    smallfont_key LessThan
    bigfont_key GreaterThan
end keyboard

begin misc
    save_lines 1024
    cut_chars "t`"'&() *,;<=>?@[]{|}"
    border_width 0
end misc

It is really simple, but lets me see my pretty backdrop images even when the window is cluttered with terminals. I had to go into my .muttrc to change the “black” to “default”, but that was no hardship.