Gnome 3.8 – Get back your terminal background transparency

Hello friends!

Hows going on? Hope everything is fine. After a long time I am going to post something about linux. After updated from Fedora 18 to Fedora 19 and the best annoying thing is my Terminal transparency vanished. I love that feature very-much because I dont like to copy paste command rather type the command myself so that I can surely see what I am doing. Terminal Transparency give me this facility when I open a web page and moved my terminal over that and see the command from web page for type.

So I tried a lot to make my terminal transparent again but failed. And come to know that Gnome Terminal in 3.8 had the transparency option dropped/removed not because it wasn’t a useful feature, but because implementation between new and old code was difficult. It makes me sad until today.

Today I found a solution for get back the transparency feature with Fedora 19 and Gnome 3.8. I ended up using the window manager cinnamon as it has advanced features of Gnome. Here is the step you need to make your Terminal Transparent,
Step 1:

sudo yum install devilspie

Step 2:

mkdir ~/.devilspie

Step 3:
Add any file in this dir ending in .ds and devilspie will process it.

gedit ~/.devilspie/terminal-opacity.ds

Step 4:
In this file add this line of code
Terminal is what fedora uses as the name of these terminals.

(if
 (matches (window_name) "Terminal")
 (opacity 85)
 )

Step 5:
Add in .bash_profile the following line. It will

devilspie -a &

Step 6:
Logout and log back in.

Bingo!!! From now on new terminal console window will be transparent – including the menu bars. Its a great relief 🙂

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8 Comments

  1. Geeks November 18, 2013 at 7:45 PM

    thanks man :D:D:D

    1. Tapan Kumer Das November 18, 2013 at 10:22 PM

      You are most welcome. Glad that I can help you. 🙂

  2. warto2000 December 16, 2013 at 5:33 PM

    The problem (for me) is that menu decorations are transparent also… it is definately not what I like 🙁 ^$&*&$&^#^ Gnome developpers 😀

    1. Tapan Kumer Das December 17, 2013 at 1:46 AM

      This is a way around to get the transparency of terminal. I just make the hole terminal window transparent 🙂 My main issue was, can read underneath web page for do the command.
      Anyway thanks for your comment.

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  4. markus February 15, 2014 at 8:30 PM

    thanks for the how to !
    you solved my problem

  5. Anders August 1, 2014 at 4:05 AM

    Thanks man! Works like a charm 🙂 I hope this bug will be properly fixed in gnome-terminal.

    1. Tapan Kumer Das August 13, 2014 at 1:10 PM

      Sorry for late reply, its my pleasure that it helps you. 🙂

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