Transparent terminal in Openbox background

M. Marschall ♦ 02/11/2010 ♦ 1 Comment

This is a guide on how to set up a transparent urxvt terminal embedded in an Openbox background.

After having installed rxvt-unicode, do:

1. Enable transparency in ~/.Xdefaults

# transparency - true or false (default)
URxvt*transparent:true

# scrollbar - true (default) or false
URxvt*scrollBar:false

# font color (default is black)
URxvt*foreground:White

URxvt*geometry:124x24

URxvt*borderLess:true

2. Edit the application section of ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml

<application name="urxvt">
  <decor>no</decor>
  <focus>yes</focus>
  <position>
    <x>center</x>
    <y>200</y>
  </position>
  <layer>below</layer>
  <desktop>all</desktop>
  <!--  <maximized>true</maximized> #Only if you want a full size terminal.-->
  <skip_taskbar>yes</skip_taskbar>
 </application>

• decor: bar on top of window with bottons to minimize, maximize and close.
• position: The origin is at the top left of the screen.
• skip_taskbar: since the terminal will be running all the time, so I don’t really need it to show up in the taskbar.

Further explanations on the options can be found in the commented section of rc.conf

3. Autostart: add entry in ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh

in my case, it looks like this:

# Programs that will run after Openbox has started
sh ~/.fehbg &                           # set background image
(sleep 1 && tint2) &                             # start panel
(sleep 1 && wbar -pos right -vbar) &          # start menu bar
(sleep 1 && urxvt) &                    # start urxvt terminal

Transparent urxvt terminal in openbox background