figosdev wrote:* i dont want a distro-specific solution. rolling my own tends to work wherever python does. mostly
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i dont normally use aterm. it was a quick way to have a lightweight term in the screencap that showed the background behind it, thats the only reason for it.

Makes perfect sense. I use aterm here for a similar purpose. I use it for borderless clear text windows for putting text on my background wallpaper. I don't use it for anything else so aterm is always completely transparent and borderless here.

im surprised that ive never had much luck with rxvt or urxvt, and i actually didnt know the latter would do transparency or pseudo-transparency. thats good to know.

urxvt is incredibly powerful in many ways. As I said, the downside is that it can be a struggle to configure even when you already know how to do it! The purpose of urxvt-style is to gently introduce people to some of the features of urxvt. The configuration all ends up in ~/.Xresources so you can inspect and/or edit that to see what is really going on. It's like a mini-ide for urxvt. I thought you might appreciate this approach. The code is much smaller than the usage text!

I cannot image using anything other than urxvt for"real" work. That's why I tried to create a simple/gentle introduction to configuring it to help others get over the hump. I often run live on a bunch of different systems. Sometimes I want to quickly tweak the size of the urxvt font (or configure it to allow me to adjust the font size) or add tabs or change the colors or adjust the transparency or blurring and so on. I can easily do all of that with urxvt-style.