# Noob question regarding urxvt and transparency



## user5813 (Oct 5, 2011)

I don't know where else to put this so I'll put it here. I want to run this command [CMD=]urxvt -tr -tint red -sh 40[/CMD] whenever I start a new session in scrotwm (every time I hit Alt-Shift-Return). Is that something I should do in bashrc or .xinitrc? I know that that command works and doesn't involve me installing any extra junk like xcompmgr or whatever so I would like to use it. I am a freebsd noob and am not sure where to start on this particular issue.


----------



## ramonovski (Oct 5, 2011)

If you don't want to use composite managers, then you must use the "fake transparency", which consists in your X root window (your wallpaper...) copied as your terminals background, and it can be activated adding these lines to ~/.Xdefaults:


```
URxvt.transparent: true
URxvt.shading: xx
```

Where xx is the value of the transparency.


----------



## SirDice (Oct 5, 2011)

Yep, default settings for urxvt are set in ~/.Xdefaults. Here's mine for reference:

```
URxvt.font: -*-terminus-medium-*-normal-*-20-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-15
URxvt.boldFont: -*-terminus-bold-*-normal-*-20-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-15
URxvt.geometry: 132x43
URxvt.background: black
URxvt.foreground: green
URxvt.cursorColor: green
URxvt.cursorBlink: true
URxvt.scrollBar: true
URxvt.scrollStyle: rxvt
URxvt.scrollBar_right: true
URxvt.saveLines: 5000
!URxvt.transparent: true
URxvt.loginShell: true
URxvt.perl-ext: default,matcher
URxvt.urlLauncher: /usr/local/bin/firefox
URxvt.matcher.rend.0: Uline Bold fg8 bg1
URxvt.keysym.C-Delete: perl:matcher
URxvt.matcher.button: 1
URxvt.matcher.pattern.1:  \\bwww\\.[\\w-]+\\.[\\w./?&@#-]*[\\w/-]
URxvt.matcher.pattern.2:  \\B(/\\S+?):(\\d+)(?=:|$)
URxvt.matcher.launcher.2: gvim +$2 $1
!jump to bottom (prompt) on keypress
URxvt*scrollTtyKeypress:  true
! !jump to bottom (prompt) on tty output
URxvt*scrollTtyOutput:    false
```
Note that a line beginning with an exclamation mark (!) is ignored. Also note I use x11-fonts/terminus-font.


----------



## user5813 (Oct 5, 2011)

wow that was embarassingly simple. Thank you, for some reason I thought the transparent option required xcompmgr (was I misled!).


----------

