Stumped...

[James A Simmons]

> I know that one of the terminal programs was 'rxvt' but I don't know
> what some of the others are.  Anybody got any ideas???

Their is Eterm, kvt, kconsole, rxvt, xterm and a few others I can't think
off the top of my head. 

> OK, this one's got me.  I've been poking around with themes in KDE and
> when I'm looking at them on themes.org, several of them show terminal
> (shell) session with transparent backgrounds.  That is to say that the
> root background shows through the window.  On one of the themes, there
> were no borders, no decorations, transparent background and ghostly
> white text that appeared to be console output floating in the ether...
> 
> HOW THE HECK DO THEY DO THAT?!?!?!
> 
> I've built pixmaps with transparent colors, ran strings on all of the
> terminal emulators I have (don't have Eterm) looking for interesting
> options, tried a few really stupid things that I didn't think would
> work and generally frustrated myself.

It's called alpha blending. You can do some fancy stuff with it. I can
post the theory behine alpha blending if you want. A example of it is    

ftp://microwindows.censoft.com/pub/microwindows/ScreenShots/Microwindows-alphablend.gif




"Look its a text editor, no its a OS, no its Emacs"
James Simmons                                                      (o_
fbdev/gfx developer                                      (o_  (o_ //\
http://www.linux-fbdev.org                              (/)_ (/)_ V_/_
http://linuxgfx.sourceforge.net