Make A Transparent Terminal on Your Desktop (Just Like in Die Hard 4 Movie)

Linux? That’s not the real me. Yeah, actually, I don’t like linux too much . But sometime, it’s really cool to use linux (but not always ). However, I assume you know linux. Don’t ask me what is linux? I don’t understand either. (Just googling it if you want to know ).

Have ever seen Die Hard 4 movie? If you don’t, I recommend you to watch it first. There is something disgusting cool inside the movie. Yeah, I saw the hacker typing something in Terminal (this isn’t the place where bus and angkot stop) on his desktop. And it’s really awesome if you can make it. See the picture below. It’d be something like this:

Okay, let’s start to make something like that. First, I’d tell you that I’m using Linux Mint 8 Helena in this tutorial. But you can do it in Debian based linux (such as ubuntu). Okay, here are the steps:

Customizing your Terminal Profile

1. Open your terminal window (Menu –> Accessories –> Terminal).
2. Create a new profile (File –> New profile).
3. Give the profile name with TransTerminal, and press Create button.

   

4. Editing Profile window will appear.
5. In General Tab, remove the check of Show menubar by default in new terminals

   

6. Go to Title and Command tab, fill Initial title with TransTerminal and make sure that keep initial title is selected on When terminal commands set theri own title

    

7. Go to Colors tab, remove the check of use colors from system theme adjust the colors based on your wallpaper.

   

8. Go to Background tab, chose transparent background and move the scrollbar to none.

   

9. Finally, go to Scrolling tab and make sure Scroll bar is disabled.

   

10. Press close, and we’ve finished the first step.

Customizing CompizConfig Settings Manager

1. I assume you’ve CompizConfig installed (in my case, because I’m using Linux Mint, It’s already installed). Open your CompizConfig Settings Manager (Menu –> Preferences –> CompizConfig Settings Manager).
2. chose Menu Utility and check regex matching.

   

3. Chose effects menu, check windows decoration, click windows decoration text, at Decoration windows column, fill it with !(title=TransTerminal). Then, click Back button

   

4. Go to Window Management,  open Place Windows, click Fixed Window Placement tab, then at Windows with fixed positions menu, click New.
5. Fill Positioned windows with title=TransTerminal. Then chose the right point where the position of the Terminal should be (based on your monitor size). Because my monitor size is 1280x800, the suitable position is X Positions: 800 and Y Positions: 0. Click Close and click Back.

   

   

6. Still at Window Management,  click Window Rules. Then, at Matches tab, copy title=TransTerminal to the column: Skip Taskbar, Skip pager, Below, Sticky, Non Resizable windows, Non minimizable windows, Non maximizable window and Non closable windows

   

7. Still at Window Rules, go to the Size rules tab. Click New, fill title=TransTerminal in Sized Windows. Now chose the right number for the size of your terminal. For my case, I better chose Width: 400 and Height: 700.

Okay, we’ve done all the steps. We did it! Now, it’s the time to try it. First, open your terminal window (Menu –> Accessories –> Terminal). Then, open new terminal with TransTerminal profile (see the picture below).

After that, you should see something disgusting cool like the first picture in this post. I’m sure you think how to make it auto run when you start your computer. Don’t worry, it’s easy. Just open your startup application (menu –> preferences –> startup application), click option, and finally click Remember Currently Running Application (make sure you don’t open any application, if not, just try it yourself ).

Now you should be proud because you can make something cool. If you have a question, just contact me . See you on my next post . CodeProject