15 November 2006

(Late) Script Friday: Fading Terminal Windows

This script was inspired by the scripts of Erik Barzeski and Daniel Jalkut.

What the script does is watch your Terminal Windows and if they are busy doing some important process it will slowly fade them into the background (increase the transparency). Once the process is complete (or if you quit the watcher), it will set the transparency back to normal.

Note: there seems to be a bug in Terminal scripting, so that changes in transparency only register when there already is a transparency set in the background color, so you have to set at least a minimal transparency for your default windows. (Move the slider in the Windows Preferences just a tick or two, you won't see it but then everything works fine.)

Some people (like my wife, believe it or not, she uses Terminal) might find all that fading and transparency is distracting. So especially for you (well, her, actually) I wrote a version that will minimize the window instead. (I find that all those windows zipping about are worse than fading windows, but she is a biologist and the stuff she invokes from the command line usually runs for a long long time, so I guess that "ghost letters" on the desktop might be distracting.)

Download the scripts here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's "Erik" by the way. Interesting idea. I'll give it a try.

Armin said...

Apologies to the typo. That's what happens when you write the post offline. :( Glad you like the idea.