In this article I will walk you through the creation of new profiles and show you why you might want them.

Assumptions

First and foremost, this article assumes you actually use the terminal and assumes you use it a lot. The pedestrian user of the terminal might not see a need for multiple profiles for a terminal window. But if you use the terminal a lot, and for various reasons, you might see how multiple profiles can make a difference.

Creating new profiles

Figure 1

Let us first take a look at how profiles are created. To create (or edit) a profile click Edit > Profiles. This will bring up a new window (see Figure 1) where you can add, edit, or delete profiles at will.

As you can see, in Figure 1, I have two current profiles – default and “no trans”. My default profile fits in with my current desktop scheme (RGBA, with heavy transparency). There are times when I need to more closely evaluate text (such as when viewing top or combing through a configuration file. For those times I switch to the “no trans” profile which is a non-transparent profile I created.

To create a new profile click the New button. When you do this a small window will open where you give your new profile a name and choose which of your current profiles to base the new profile on. Let’s say, for the sake of example, I want to create a profile for any time I am using the terminal as the root user. This can come in very handy (and keep you from doing something you don’t want to do).  For this I am going to call the profile “Root” and base it on “no trans”. Once you’ve done that the main profile editor window will appear (see Figure 2) .

In this new window you can change quite a bit for your profile. For a profile to work as the administrative user you might want to do something like create a white background with red text, or a red background with black text. For such an instance I like to alter the Title and command to ensure there is no mistaking I am using the administrative user. To do this click on the Title and Command tab and then change the Initial title to be something like ROOT User: USE CAUTION. You can then select to prepend this title if the terminal command sends it’s own title (which is often the case).

Figure 3

The new “root” profile will look something like that in Figure 3.

Switching profiles

This is simple, and can be done on the fly. All you need to do is click Terminal > Change Profile and select the profile you want.

Final thoughts

Make use of the gnome-terminal profiles and your life will be much easier. There are a lot of reasons why you would want to use them and tons of modifications you can make to them.

But with the plethora of terminal emulators available, why would you add yet another? Aterm offers some features that most other players can not touch. One of the more obvious features is that of transparency. I know, I know – both GNOME and KDE terminals do transparency, but not as easily and as well as aterm. Let’s see how this is done.

First and foremost to get aterm to open with various forms of transparency you will be issuing a command. Once you have settled on the exact combination of arguments you like you can then create an icon, launcher, or menu entry to suit your needs.

With that in mind let’s take a look at some of the options to allow you to get some funky-ness with aterm.

the first thing we will do is basic transparency. To get basic transparency you execute the aterm command like so:

aterm -tr

To expedite coolness I am going to add a couple of switches:

aterm -tr -fg white -bg blue +sb

The above command will produce an aterm like you see below.

Basic aterm transparency

What I did with the above command is:

• tr – Enable transparency
• fg – Change the forground color (text)
• bf – Background color (highlight)
• sb – With the “+” symbol the scroll bar is turned off

That is not all we can do. Let’s add the following:

tint – Add a tinting color to the transparency

fade – Fade the contents of the aterm window when it no longer has focus. The amount is from 0-100 with 0 being the most fade.

Here’s what the command aterm -tr -tint blue -fade 50 -fg white -bg blue +sb will look like.

Aterm with Fade

Naturally you’ll want to play around with colors and fade amounts depending upon your theme/background.

Final Thoughts

This has given you but a taste of what the aterm terminal emulator can do. If you’re like me, and you like some desktop eyecandy, this is a great way to get it without having to pump up your resources or spend all day tweaking.