Trying to get dwm, urxvt, transparency to work nicely together

Question

New Arch user here, great distribution.
I've been trying to set up dwm with the Monaco font (great monospace/ttf font) and transparency. As you know, dwm launches uxterm by default as a new terminal. I wanted something with transparency, so I tried urxvt and tried to get it to use "fake" transparency (I could try real transparency, but when I launch xcompmgr I get a plethora of streaming error messages, so I guess I'll have the fake stuff). My ~.Xresources file looks like so:
! URxvt*font: Monaco
URxvt*background: black
URxvt*foreground: white
URxvt*termName: rxvt
URxvt*multichar_encoding: utf-8
URxvt*transparent: true
URxvt*tintColor: white
URxvt*shading: 50
URxvt*loginShell: true
URxvt*scrollBar: false
URxvt*scrollKey: true
URxvt*saveLines: 3000
I grabbed this somewhere from the net. I've commented out the font, because its another issue and I'll address it below. After saving this, and running xrdb -load ~/.Xresources, I try launching urxvt. The colors work fine (background and foreground), but I can't seem to get the transparency working at all. Instead its just a solid color.
As for the font, I installed Monaco from the arch repos. I tried using xlsfonts to get the "name" of the font, but that showed up nothing. Can urxvt use ttf fonts?
Thanks for your help, I'll post anything else anyone needs.
Last edited by maxmackie (2012-05-29 23:41:54)

Answer 1

JackH79 wrote:
This will probably help (it will probably help with your font problems as well). See what it says about using shading and tintColor at the same time.
Also, just for future reference, please use Code tags for posting file content or terminal output.
Like this:
[code]Some text[/code]
Thanks for the link. I must have skimmed over too quickly last time. I got the font working, awesome how the wiki uses the font I want as an example For the transparency however, no dice. I tried using either only shading or tint, but both of them failed. Just to be 100% certain, I don't need xcompmgr running or anything for this to work right?
Trilby wrote:I'm not sure where dwm comes into play here, but I will give you one of my own grievances: I much prefer "real" transparency because with psuedo-transparency, whenever the layout changes, there seems to be a good bit of lag between to windows changing shape and the pseudo-background being redrawn.  It's ugly as hell - so I use true transparency.  I'm still working, however, on a dwm patch to "hide other" windows in monocle mode, because as is, a true transparent terminal in monocle mode shows other windows below it ... also ugly as hell.
The only saving grace is that I never really use terminals in monocle mode - thats just for my web browser on occasion.
As for the problem at hand, I second Jack's point.  Remove one of those and try again.
I figured I'd mention dwm seeing as they mention transparency issues out of box (ie, none). I thought maybe running dwm required me to have an extra daemon running or something... I do agree that true transparency would be much nicer, but I'm running into big issues with xcompmgr. Running from shell dumps an endless stream of "error 163: BadPicture request 149 minor 8 serial xxxxx" and running it straight from dmenu results in ugly transparency between different tags in dwm (I have a terminal open on tag 1 and firefox open on tag 2, I can see firefox through the terminal on tag 1). Admittedly, I haven't read into anything regarding xcompmgr so these could all be trivial issues.
jasonwryan wrote:Welcome to the boards Max. What took you so long?
Hey Jason. Well, a couple years back I saw your awesome screenshot of dwm and decided to switch from KDE to it. I guess recently I felt like going the whole way and running Arch. I loved getting everything up and running manually (nothing like installing an OS and being given only a simple terminal ). Thanks for the welcome.