If you don't like the
shading or
tinting effects that eterm
has built into it or they are too
slow for you (eterm is really a bit slow actually),
you could try the following to have backgrounds or
images in your
terminal emulator. Choose a
background you want to modify, open
gimp or whatever application you are using for editing your
graphics, open the background. Now if you are using gimp (and you can use a bit) make a new transparent
layer on your background, do some
effects (
gradients or
waves are cool) on it, and then take the
opacity down until you like it (and you can see the background layer through the upper layer). Now save your background,
remember its name and open a
shell. If you want to use this background in eterm, use the -P option to specify the
image's location, and --viewport-mode which is like having a transparent eterm using the image you specified as your background. So if you have created a blue to black gradient on your image and you are using viewport-mode (with the same image in eterm and on your background) it will look like a transparent eterm with a
funky blue to
black gradient on it.
Try it if you didn't understand this fully, you'll be happy with it, because it will look cool and it should be faster than using a transparent
terminal.
Thanks to http://q3test.2y.net/~moyix/etweak.html