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Many terminals nowadays let you set a background image on the terminal itself.
Which terminals let you set a random background image from a directory or list of images? Also need to be able to have multiple terminals with different background images open, so having a script that moves around images won't work.
I like this because when you have lots of terminals open, you can associate each with their background image. Also if your background image isn't a tiled thing or a stylized gradient (such as a human, etc), it might look bad when duplicated all over the screen.
I could use transparency, but I don't like psuedo transparency, and real transparency comes with all sorts of problems. (For me at least.) I would still prefer having multiple background images though.
Konsole and eterm are the only two I know that can do this, but konsole is KDE, and eterm has no unicode support, is dead (I think), and is ugly.
Last edited by sokuban (2008-12-31 21:20:12)
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urxvt can do this, if it's compiled with afterimage support. Check its man page - I believe you use the 'pixmap' option. It'd probably be simple to make a shell script that starts it using a random image I personally don't know how, 'cause I'm still a shell noob
Last edited by Ranguvar (2008-12-31 03:58:17)
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Thanks, I'll check it out.
Even if I have a script to make it start with a random image can it have a different backgrounds for each terminal at the same time?
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Many terminals nowadays let you set a background image on the terminal itself.
Which terminals let you set a random background image from a directory or list of images? Also need to be able to have multiple terminals with different background images open, so having a script that moves around images won't work.
I like this because when you have lots of terminals open, you can associate each with their background image. Also if your background image isn't a tiled thing or a stylized gradient (such as a human, etc), it might look bad when duplicated all over the screen.
I could use transparency, but I don't like psuedo transparency, and real transparency comes with all sorts of problems. (For me at least.) I would still prefer having multiple background images though.
Konsole and eterm are the only two I know that can do this, but konsole is KDE, and eterm has no unicode support, is dead (I think), and is ugly.
I only read the first 2 paragraphs.
Your goal is so specific that it is better done from a script, that randomly picks an image and runs the terminal emulator with the appropriate parameter. mlterm and rxvt-unicode both allow background image as parameter.
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Got around to recompiling urxvt with abs now.
It works perfectly! Thanks.
I just need to find out how to use urxvt to my liking, no clue how to use this thing. *Reads man page*
(I still need a script. I can work on that myself later, but if anyone happens to have one, I'd appreciate it if you show it here.)
Last edited by sokuban (2008-12-31 20:48:48)
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Hey, Eterm can too. it has some pretty pixmaps, give it a shot you might like Eterm for an alternate terminal. It also has transperancy so you can see through to your desktop. And it changes the pixmaps randomly, have fun.
Last edited by mfsfly (2009-01-01 04:43:06)
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Got around to recompiling urxvt with abs now.
It works perfectly! Thanks.
I just need to find out how to use urxvt to my liking, no clue how to use this thing. *Reads man page*
(I still need a script. I can work on that myself later, but if anyone happens to have one, I'd appreciate it if you show it here.)
Did you use urxvt from AUR?
I want to try it but I can get a copy of LibAfterImage. Their ftp seem to be down...
Shaika-Dzari
http://www.4nakama.net
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sokuban wrote:Got around to recompiling urxvt with abs now.
It works perfectly! Thanks.
I just need to find out how to use urxvt to my liking, no clue how to use this thing. *Reads man page*
(I still need a script. I can work on that myself later, but if anyone happens to have one, I'd appreciate it if you show it here.)
Did you use urxvt from AUR?
I want to try it but I can get a copy of LibAfterImage. Their ftp seem to be down...
I googled libafterimage and got it from sourceforge. I used the libafterimage from aur but changed the source. I used the urxvt from abs and added libafterimage as a compile option and dependancy.
But I have lots of problems with it that I am too lazy to fix at the moment. The fonts don't look so good/aren't anti aliased/are too small, Tibetan and Malayalam don't show (heh), and I want to get rid of that ugly scrollbar.
Urxvt man page says you need mlterm for Indic scripts, but mlterm's defaults fair worse and can't even display East Asian scripts properly so I'm not even gonna try. (I don't really care about Tibetan and Malayalam in the terminal so much.)
In my first post I talked about why I can't use Eterm. I need unicode support as I have lots of files etc in East Asian scripts.
EDIT: Also I just noticed, but scim doesn't work with urxvt. Oh man, I don't know what to do about this one. I'm thinking about giving this up now.
Last edited by sokuban (2009-01-01 05:33:15)
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Fonts are fixed with a patched AUR package, you can blur them them by using a TTF font in the console (Google Xdefaults urxvt), scrollbar can be changed or removed through Xdefaults as well (again, Google Xdefalts urxvt... urxvt's man pages also have comprehensive info). As for some fonts not displaying, chat up the urxvt devs and see if there's anything that can be done.
And, on the topic of scim and odd language scripts:
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=61090 (check their settings)
Last edited by Ranguvar (2009-01-09 21:54:50)
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So now that time has passed and I'm on a clean new install, I decided to try out uxvrt again. The good news in that now I can type in it with scim. I have no clue how or why, but it means the greatest hurdle is gone.
I also even managed to get a good looking English font.
urxvt*font: xft:Monospace:pixelsize=12
Only problem is a readable east asian font. The default font is a mess and everything is squished together. If I explicitly select an east asian font, then there are huge spaces between each letter, even for english. So I find out this is a known bug, and I find a patched aur package for it, but the patch doesn't seem to make a difference.
I know urxvt lets you select a main font and a secondary font and so on. Maybe I did the syntax wrong. I tried both:
urxvt*font: xft:Monospace:pixelsize=16
urxvt*font: xft:WenQuanYi Zen Hei:size=9:antialias=True
and
urxvt*font: xft:Monospace:pixelsize=16,urxvt*font: xft:WenQuanYi Zen Hei:size=9:antialias=True
Neither of them worked. From what my understanding of what the man page says, the size of the cell is supposed to be based on the main font, but in both those cases the secondary font stretches the cells.
Can anybody reccomend fonts for east asian scripts that work well and show me your .Xdefaults ?
FAKE EDIT: I just thought of an idea, and it kinda works:
urxvt*font: xft:Monospace:pixelsize=16,xft:WenQuanYi Zen Hei:size=9:antialias=True
Now I get a readable font, but massive spacing issues between Chinese Characters.
EDIT: About the pixmaps, I got a script to randomly select and image and all is fine, but I can't seem to find a way to disable scaling. I can set the size of the picture by a percent, but it doesn't let me use decimals and it is impossible to get the exact resolution of the picture to display. (Unless I let it tile, but the pictures I am using aren't meant to be tiled.) Is there a way to either disable scaling, or set the urxvt size in pixels so I could make it exactly 640x480. The urxvt man page says that a scale of 1 disables scaling, but it seems to have no effect.
EDIT2: I just noticed I can't use scim now. I have no clue why, but I think compiling it with afterimage support breaks it.
EDIT3: I found out why scim was not working/working. I had to add this to my ~/.scim/global:
/SupportedUnicodeLocales = en_CA.UTF-8
I also got a script that works, kinda:
#!/bin/bash
image="$(ls /usr/local/share/cgs | sort -R | tail -1)"
urxvt -pixmap /usr/local/share/cgs/$image\;86x100
The only problem is that I don't know how to get urxvt -pixmap to keep the aspect ratio of the image. 86x100 is the closest it will let me get to the actual aspect ratio, but it is off slightly. Barely noticable. The man page says that propscale will do this, but it doesn't seem to work.
Either way, for now, I am just going to use 86x100.
Last edited by sokuban (2009-03-22 02:01:45)
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