Terminal transparency and proper refreshing

Question

Hi. I am having some problems with finding a decent terminal program.
I am using Fluxbox, and so I don't want any DE specific terminal programs.
I have xterm by default, and have been playing with urxvt, aterm and mrxvt as well.
I originally wanted a terminal program with tabs and transparency, however tabs don't matter to me anymore and fluxbox has native support anyway. Now, just proper transparency is important to me. I understand Fluxbox can induce real transparency with xcompmgr, but this has the effect of making the entire window transparent. I am looking for a terminal that supports real transparency naively so the window bar and border will not be transparent, while the "terminal part" will be.
I'm not 100% sure, but out of these I think only urxvt fits the bill, with aterm and mrxvt only supporting pseudo transparency. Is this correct?
Second to this, and my more urgent problem, is that none of the terminals except xterm seem to fresh properly. in xterm I can do everything I can do in a real tty, I can edit with vi, use curses programs etc...no problems. However each of urxvt, mrxvt and aterm behave the same way, and do not refresh properly. If I try to edit a file in vi in any of these, I can only see maybe one or two lines of the file, and can't scroll through or anything...it's impossible to actually edit.
I also note in urxvt, mrxvt and aterm the home and end keys don't work, however they work in xterm just as they do on a tty. For example in each of the non xterm terminals pressing home just gives a tilde, which means I have to hold down the left arrow to get to the end of the line, which can be frustrating.
Obviously the other 3 terminals are are emulating a different terminal type to what xterm does...perhaps. However I have not found a way to test this. For those people using a non xterm terminal, how did you solve this?
I also had some somewhat related questions that I hope I don't need to make a separate post for(they seem so trivial but really bug me)
1. How would I press alt + enter inside a terminal? For example running wicd-curses from a terminal(Even an xterm) you need to press alt + enter to save settings, however from a terminal alt + enter has no effect. Is their any way to force this key combination?
2. I notice when starting a terminal, the shell lacks a prompt. Why do terminals start interactive shells by default, and why do interactive shells not have a prompt? Is their a way to make interactive shells inherrit the same prompt that login shells use? I use both zsh and bash. Is their any practical difference between using a login and interactive shell?
3. If I am running an X session as a normal user, and su to root in a terminal, is their any way I can start X programs as root and get them to display in the X session of my  normal user? I normally get an error similar to unable to open display
3a. I just tested...I normally 'su -' out of habbit, and then I get an "unable to open display" error. I just used su, so roots profile was not loaded, and I can start X programs as root. Why does this work?
4. I was wondering if it was possible to have the titlebar of a terminal show the current command or path? Something more unique than just every window open saying urxvt or whatever.
Many thanks for any help!
Last edited by josh000 (2010-04-20 07:27:55)

Answer 1

josh000 wrote:I'm not 100% sure, but out of these I think only urxvt fits the bill, with aterm and mrxvt only supporting pseudo transparency. Is this correct?
Urxvt does both real and pseudo transparancy, but this still needs your wm to have composite enabled. Also roxterm or evilvte may be an alternative. For urxvt set transparancy in .Xdefaults like this (I'm not too sure anymore what it all does but you can google it):
URxvt*depth:32
URxvt*background: rgba:2500/2500/2500/cccc #for semitransparancy
# or:
URxvt*inheritPixmap: true
URxvt*tintColor: white
URxvt*shading: 40
josh000 wrote:I also note in urxvt, mrxvt and aterm the home and end keys don't work, however they work in xterm just as they do on a tty.
Try stuff like this:
*VT100.Translations: #override \
<Key>BackSpace: string(0x7F)\n\
<Key>Delete: string("\033[3~")\n\
<Key>Home: string("\033[1~")\n\
<Key>End: string("\033[4~")
josh000 wrote:4. I was wondering if it was possible to have the titlebar of a terminal show the current command or path? Something more unique than just every window open saying urxvt or whatever.
I think this has more to do with shell than terminal. You have zsh and bash examples here
As for your other issues: I never had them, don't know. Hope this helps a bit.
Last edited by VCoolio (2010-04-22 09:45:56)