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10.3: Use Terminal background pictures with cutouts Apps
The Panther Terminal application now allows you to set a background picture for Terminal windows. You can do this globally for all new windows, or for individual windows. Set the background picture through the Terminal -> Window Settings -> Color tab.

You can add pictures in a variety of formats. I've personally tried PNGs and PDFs; I would assume that other image types supported by Panther and/or QuickTime would also work.

If your PDF has a "cutout" -- the kind you'd create with Modify -> Combine -> Punch command when combining objects in Macromedia Freehand -- and your window is transparent, you can actually have that cutout in your Terminal window, as seen on this page I put together. The cutout will act like like a completely transparent portion of the window, giving an interior shadow (just like the normal shadow around the outside border of the Terminal window). It's a little hard to describe, but it's a very neat effect.
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10.3: Use Terminal background pictures with cutouts
Authored by: clarityprod on Dec 14, '03 04:47:00AM

This works with jpeg fils as well thank god. Very cool. I like being able to coltroll the look and feel of my environment as much as possible.

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kenneth bailey
Owner
Clarity Production LLC



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10.3: Use Terminal background pictures with cutouts
Authored by: Hanji on Dec 14, '03 08:47:00PM

Whoa ... I don't know if this is useful or annoying, but it's kinda cool...

If you have a background with transparent cutouts, and you click on the transparent areas, the click gets transferred to whatever's behind the terminal - it's not sent to the terminal window. It can be annoying, but it's kinda cool.

And my terminal window know has a giant Tux cutout :-D



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10.3: Use Terminal background pictures with cutouts
Authored by: SYFer on Dec 15, '03 04:17:13AM

To put this in more universal terms, the Terminal now supports an alpha channel. Very nicely. In fact, I have a TIFF with feathered opacities in mine now and it is breathtaking.

How did I miss this? Good tip.



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10.3: Use Terminal background pictures with cutouts
Authored by: stonematt on Dec 15, '03 10:08:19AM
I setup a crontab to rotate images in my terminal. (I'm sure there is a better/simpler way to do this in a script, but I didn't want to think about it...)

0,20,40      *       *       *       *       cp /Users/mstone/Pictures/desktop/1280-a.jpg /Users/mstone/Pictures/term/term.jpg
5,25,45      *       *       *       *       cp /Users/mstone/Pictures/desktop/1280-b.jpg /Users/mstone/Pictures/term/term.jpg
10,30,50     *       *       *       *       cp /Users/mstone/Pictures/desktop/1280-c.jpg /Users/mstone/Pictures/term/term.jpg
15,35,55     *       *       *       *       cp /Users/mstone/Pictures/desktop/1280-e.jpg /Users/mstone/Pictures/term/term.jpg


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10.3: Use Terminal background pictures with cutouts
Authored by: Jaharmi on Dec 22, '03 07:09:19PM

Hey, that's a pretty cool idea, too. I like it.

After I wrote this tip, I was thinking that Apple ought to have a way to rotate background pictures in the Terminal and the Finder. Your idea handles part of that. (I wish Apple would make Finder window backgrounds scriptable ... !)



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