How to change a font/background color in transparent windows

colorsterminal

When you select something, the color of the selection usually changes to the font color, and the font color is being set to backgroud color. So, if you have a black background in a terminal, and the font is orange, you will get an orange selection and a black font color.

What would happen if you had a transparent window, and the transparency was set to 100%? Just take a look at the following pics.

The one with a black background:

And the transparent one:

Is there a way to change the font/background color of transparent windows?

Best Answer

I found a solution. There are two parameters that can be used (added to the ~/.Xresources file):

URxvt*highlightColor:       #000000
URxvt*highlightTextColor:   #D75F00

Here's the explanation:

   highlightColor: colour
       If set, use the specified colour as the background for highlighted
       characters. If unset, use reverse video.

   highlightTextColor: colour
       If set and highlightColor is set, use the specified colour as the
       foreground for highlighted characters.

And now the selected text on fully transparent window looks like this:

Related Solutions

Tmux – How to Reset Background to Transparent

The "transparent" feature relies upon the applications which run in the terminal to not explicitly set the background color. In particular, when clearing the background, these applications should not set the color. That corresponds to a terminal feature known as back color erase, or bce.

The TERM=screen-256color entry tells applications that they have to set the color when clearing the display (to ensure that the current color is used). There is a different terminal description screen-256color-bce which would do what you want in this case.

Yellow appears as brown in konsole

The 8 standard colors numbered 1 through 8 officially contains primary and secondary colors (black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white), but there is considerable variation: many terminals don't show primary colors, but instead show variants thereof. Yours shows the following RGB values:

383a3a ff3950 00b226 c56227 022bab fd16de 00b5ae aeb2b3

while nominal values with roughly similar brightness would be

000000 a00000 00a000 808000 0000a0 800080 008080 808080

There is considerable variation on all colors, not just on the one for which you choose to give a different name. Yellow does however have a tradition of being made more brownish because actual yellow tends to be poorly contrasted on a white background (and sometimes blue is made more grayish to be better-contrasted on a black background).

You can change the colors used by Konsole if they bother you. In the profile settings, go to the “Appearance” tab and either choose from one of the profiles or make up your own. You can even make the colors resemble nothing like the standard ones if you wish, though that may be confusing at times.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Tmux – How to Reset Background to Transparent

Yellow appears as brown in konsole

Related Question