Please keep (un-deprecate) transparent background in VTE
@egmontkob
Submitted by Egmont Koblinger Link to original bug (#720288)
Description
G-T dropped support for transparent background, current VTE (0.35) still contains the feature but is marked as deprecated.
Please seriously consider un-deprecating it and keeping the support in VTE. I perfectly understand if transparent background is against Gnome's overall design, and I don't mind at all if the feature is removed from G-T.
VTE, however, is used by many other terminals. There are users complaining all over in this bugzilla as well as elsewhere about the lack of transparency and they are switching away. E.g. here: http://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2013/12/09/a-terminal-surprise/ someone says he switched to xfce4-terminal because of this, heck he doesn't know that that one also uses VTE.
VTE is one of the most popular and best terminal emulators for Linux, it definitely has some serious shortcomings, but also has some killer features, let alone this is according to my knowledge the only one that is a library and not an application, so it's the perfect choice for anyone building a new terminal frontend, not necessarily with integration to the Gnome environment in mind.
https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Apps/Terminal/FAQ contains a workaround, says that the "you can however still get the same effect by..." but it's not true, the workarounds make the whole window (menubar, tab bar, window decoration, and whichever fg/bg colors used by the terminal) translucent, this is definitely different from what VTE's transparency does where only the default background is translucent, not the other colors or the chrome around the terminal area.
VTE contains tons of features that are only useful to a certain group of people, e.g. I personally can't see the use of an infinite scrollback, still it's there for popular demand. Transparency is also one of these, I can't see any point in it but many users do and would like to have it, not necessarily in G-T but in other VTE-based terminal applications. Please let's not make it a regression for them, please let them keep using VTE rather than switching to some other terminal. After putting so much work into this product, I'd hate to see many users turning away because of the removal of such a popular feature. It's not about the Gnome environment or G-T users, it's about the users (and developers) of all the other VTE-based terminals.
I'm sure there are other features too that are supported by VTE but not exposed via G-T. Off the top of my head, custom dingus regexes is one that occurs to me, I'd guess there are a couple more. I don't see any problem with transparency being one of these.
Version: 0.35.x
Resolution: RESOLVED FIXED