10.3: Use Terminal background pictures with cutouts

Dec 14, '03 01:11:00AM

Contributed by: Jaharmi

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.

Comments (5)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20031120203213536