Friday, May 09, 2008

MC get a transparent background with GNOME Terminal

Quiet right answer to the question "What is the most popular file manager on Linux system?" is mc -- Midnight Commander (one of my friend gave another name Midnight Condom :) ). mc is powerful tool for users, works both in console and graphical user interface. mc supports transparent effect in GNOME Terminal. See screenshot bellow (click on image to see it in full size):



Just add the [Colors] code section in my ini to your $HOME$/.mc/ini and be aware that text is on only one line. Also change GNOME-Terminal's profile to have transparent background. You may can (need) to correct the values to fit your desktop appearance. From mc(1):

In the Colors section, the default color map is loaded from the base_color variable. You can specify an alternate color map for a terminal by using the terminal name as the key in this section. Example:

[Colors]
base_color=
xterm=menu=magenta:marked=,magenta:markselect=,red

The format for the color definition is:

keyword=foregroundcolor,backgroundcolor:keyword= ...

The colors are optional, and the keywords are: normal, selected,marked, markselect, errors, input, reverse, gauge. Menu colors are: menu, menusel, menuhot, menuhotsel. Dialog colors are: dnormal, dfocus, dhotnormal, dhotfocus. Help colors are: helpnormal, helpitalic, helpbold, helplink, helpslink. Viewer color is: viewunderline. Special highlighting colors are: executable, directory, link, stalelink, device, special, core. Editor colors are: editnormal, editbold, editmarked.

The possible colors are: black, gray, red, brightred, green, brightgreen, brown, yellow, blue, brightblue, magenta, brightmagenta, cyan, brightcyan, lightgray and white. And there is a special keyword for transparent background. It is ’default’. The ’default’ can only be used for background color. Example:

[Colors]
base_color=normal=white,default:marked=magenta,default

Here is full view of my Debian desktop with Ubuntu background image :). Thanks Ubuntu community for that beautiful and other images.



Some, maybe useful, information about this GNOME theme:
  • gdesklets applets
  • Controls = Clearlooks
  • Colors: Windows = 787878, ffffff
  • Window Border = Correcamins
  • Icons = Rodent

2 comments:

CuongP said...

Hi bro, how can you use MC in graphical mode? i'm still a newbie in Linux world.
Thank you!

Edroshz said...

Very cool visual work man!!!