HOWTO: Have a transparent desktop terminal... without the hassle!

One thing I like to have in a system is quick access to a terminal. This can be useful for checking things real quick, trying out or seeing what commands I see do, and so on. There's nothing that combines this simplicity with looking sharp more than the ability to build a shell into your desktop.

When I first started using the terminal often, I found a great program called Yakuake that did provided that in a convenient drop-down console, ala so many FPS (and other) computer games. At one point, I decided to try a GNOME alternative, and happened across Tilda.

This was good for a time, then I tried Kubuntu and switched back to Yakuake. I once again switched back to GNOME, and this time decided I wasn't very much in the mood to keep using the drop down terminals. They obscured windows, seemed sluggish at times, and worst of all were just plain too small for some things without making them so large as to be silly.

I decided to try one of the tutorials for leaving a transparent terminal on your desktop. They all required using gnome-terminal along with another program, along with a fair amount of rigging to get it to work. Unfortunately, they didn't. There were problems with focus in devilspie, and alltray was just awkward to use (it left an icon in the system tray, and had to be clicked to open it, which seemed to remove the entire point.)

It was then I realized that I could use Tilda to do much the same thing, and in a fraction of the time! This can be easily done in a minute or two, without having to worry about making configuration files or fiddling with troublesome oddities.


Step 1: Install Tilda.

Duh. In Ubuntu, this is as simple as running

sudo apt-get install tilda

Keep in mind that this will install 0.09.4; the latest version is 0.09.5. If you want the latest version, or don't use Ubuntu, you can get information on how to install it from http://tilda.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Step 2: Configure Tilda.

When you first install Tilda, it will ask you for your configuration. These settings are the only ones I'm aware of that will change it from the strange box in the upper left to the full desktop I use. I might have missed something, so please let me know if it does not work. There are some things here you'll probably want to change yourself (font size, cursor, etc.) but I'll leave that up to you.

General:
Uncheck 'Always on top.'
Uncheck 'Start Tilda hidden'

Appearance:

This is a bit more up to you. I personally have Height at 97% and width at 100%, however this will obscure desktop icons. You might want to have yours centered, you might want to have it just to the right or left of your icons. I personally don't use anything like AWM or desktop icons, so it does not matter to me. Feel free to set whatever you care to for the height and positioning, just keep in mind that however you set them will be an important part in how they look.

Under extras, make sure "Enable Transparency" is checked. The level of transparency will depend on if you want the terminal to look like it's built into the desktop (as I have it), or more like it's floating over the desktop, so it's up to you.

Scrolling:

Set "Scrollbar is:" to Disabled. You can put it back on later if you must, but a scrollbar that appears to just be floating around on nothing (due to the lack of window borders and such) will look weird.

Keybindings:

Set the keybinding to something you can remember, but which is also something you aren't going to hit accidentally, or out of habit. For people that used yakuake/tilda or another similar console before, it might be a habit to just hit an F key once you're done using it, that will ruin this. I personally have mine set to Shift+F8. You want to make sure you can remember this, in case you accidentally minimize the window and need to recall it.

Your end result should look something like the picture at the top. It's just that easy!

There's only one major problem with this right now, and that's the fact that if you hit a minimize hotkey, or show desktop, this will be minimized. However, I asked one of the developers of Tilda about this, and he said he will try to make that changeable by the next version's release.