what can I do about restoring transparency function in gnome-terminal?

EbonJaeger

GNOME removed the functionality of terminal transparency years ago. Fedora had been maintaining a patch adding it back, which Solus used. But, with the release of the latest new terminal designed for GNOME, they have stopped maintaining the patch.

There is no way to have transparency with GNOME terminal any longer. I think literally every other terminal out there does support transparency, though, so you may want to go looking for one of those.

brent

EbonJaeger yeah all of a sudden I got the urge to get it more transparent like Old Times but wth instead. thanks for the info.
Know any emulators off the top of your head that are pretty minimal like gnome?

ps thanks for reply

JTCPingas

brent gnome-console is even more minimal than gnome-terminal. But that one doesn't support transparency at all.

brent

JTCPingas thank you. want the transparency option but I like you were thinking no bells & whistles

pomon

I switched to tilix

brent

pomon thank you. auditioning tomorrow. as well as alacritty, st, termite, and other No Fuss terminals. the first bell or whistle I see will cause a removal. need to replicate the easy, modest gnome-terminal experience, except with, you know, transparency. I did not like the xfce terminal though. this will be a Goldilocks venture for 'just right'. thx for your reply

brent

pomon auditioned Tilix tonight. I must have broke that too 🙂. It would not set/honor/keep the bigger font size I put in settings. I went from 12 to 15. Over and over but it would not change from 12.
Alacritty later and more.

elfprince

brent Transparency - what is it that draws you to it? Is it the coolness factor? Nerdish or geek feeling?

As for me, the first thing I do with a new terminal set up, is to turn off the transparency. Otherwise, it is really distracting to see the desktop layers underneath it, plus it is difficult to read stuff in the terminal. Practicality factor.
😁

lupetto3

I was in your position literally 2 days ago. I don’t know why it bugs me…I just want transparency. I trialled a few, Mate terminal and tilix were pretty good, I ended up choosing tilix

pomon

elfprince To each their own. That's the beauty of Linux, right? 😉

brent

elfprince I like about 80% dark on demand for the times I have to read someone else's terminal directions for the stuff I messed up 🙂. Otherwise dark.

Harvey

brent Alacritty later

Alacritty has no GUI for its settings, you need to create / edit a toml file.

Some suggestions to get you started with ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml

[font]
size = 15.0

[window]
opacity = 0.9
startup_mode = "Maximized"

More settings https://alacritty.org/config-alacritty.html

Alacritty by design has no tabs / panes if you want those features you need to use zellij or tmux with it.

brent

Harvey Alacritty has no GUI for its settings, you need to create / edit a toml file.

Some suggestions to get you started with ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml

thank you! I saw no file menu/setting at all. I just started looking at customizing config https://yourdevkit.com/cheat-sheet/alacritty

these guys say look for a yaml not a toml "- Open the Alacritty configuration file located at ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml."

In Solus I can't find a toml or yaml with the package so i will create one. alacritty does not reside in ~/.config either so is that where I should save the toml?

on to: https://yourdevkit.com/cheat-sheet/alacritty

Solarmass

I prefer Alacritty too. It's more for advanced users because you configure it from config file.
Kitty is also an option, it's similar to Alacritty but has tabs support, all configuration from config file as well.

Harvey Alacritty by design has no tabs / panes if you want those features you need to use zellij or tmux with it.

yea, if you feel adventurous, you can try tmux or zellij too 🙂

Harvey

brent these guys say look for a yaml not a toml

They are out of date. It used to use yaml it converted to toml.

brent In Solus I can't find a toml or yaml with the package so i will create one. alacritty does not reside in ~/.config either so is that where I should save the toml?

The file does not exist by default.

mkdir ~/.config/alacritty

and create a alacritty.toml in that directory.

brent

Harvey mkdir ~/.config/alacritty

and create a alacritty.toml in that directory.

done. will spend some time configuring. appreciate the steer, Harvey, thank you. I like this terminal (emulator). EDIT PS--I started with your cut and paste. nice

WhiteWolf

You can try Kitty, pretty nice terminal.

brent

Solarmass prefer Alacritty too. It's more for advanced users because you configure it from config file.
Kitty is also an option, it's similar to Alacritty but has tabs support, all configuration from config file as well.

think I'm going to stick with Alacritty. It looks and acts just the amount of Vanilla Plain(TM) that I like these days. i will confess something to you Solarmass, when I joined linux I would be downright frightened andfearful to make all my moves in a .config file with no GUI. after this long, and dabbling with DMs and WMs I no longer have any fear. 🙂

Solarmass

brent hink I'm going to stick with Alacritty. It looks and acts just the amount of Vanilla Plain(TM) that I like these days.

there are themes for Alacritty you can find on github, you can set a theme colors in the same config file.
I use Alacritty with tmux, so I have tabs and splits. There is one annoying problem with rendering output with Alacritty at the moment, but it 's only for Xorg.

i will confess something to you Solarmass, when I joined linux I would be downright frightened andfearful to make all my moves in a .config file with no GUI. after this long, and dabbling with DMs and WMs I no longer have any fear. 🙂

that means you're no longer linux noob 😄
Those .config files are easy to backup and copy to another system. It's also fun to edit them with cool cli editors like micro, but that discussion for another thread.

brent

Solarmass
this thing has mild irritants. I can live with the 'no tabs' things since you can just CTRL+N for a new window but this thing does not come with a scrollbar...I have searched the internet everywhere...Solus updates just now I could not see a dam* thing (they went by like lightning and there was no getting to the top). Holding my thumb in the up arrow it took too many seconds to get to the top to see what I installed so I gave up. Is there a workaround for scrolling? I will keep looking.

Harvey

brent
Part of why I use zellij (I customised its config too because the defaults annoyed me) I just alt+s and now I am in scroll mode so I can use arrow keys or pageup/down to scroll quickly.

Solarmass

brent Is there a workaround for scrolling? I will keep looking.

I use tmux on top and I can scroll with mouse and use pgup/pgdn.
In plain Alacritty you can change mode with Ctrl+Shift+Space and use Shift + PageUp / PageDown to scroll.

Or set your custom shortcuts for:

ScrollPageUp
ScrollPageDown
ScrollLineUp
ScrollLineDown
ScrollToTop
ScrollToBottom

from https://old.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/k1kyzn/scrolling_updown_in_alacritty_using_keyboard

looks like there is no scrollbar support for Alacritty