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Textmate Has Transparency? No way!

Published: April 15th, 2008

I just have to share this amazingly aesthetically pleasing find. Textmate has transparency! Find out how it looks in my screenshot.

What a pleasant surprise!

When a co-worker had transparency in his Textmate1 window, I almost fainted with excitement. Not only was it beautiful, but his reasoning was amazing: “I don’t have a second monitor so I set my Textmate window to be trasparent so I can watch Southpark while coding.” No way right? This is a double-awesome find.

Screenshot time

It’s quite really easy, all you have to do is change the transparency bar in your style settings. Eventually I got mine to look like this:

How awesome right?

Grab My Theme

Grab it at github: Transparent Fisch Textmate Theme Repo

  1. Textmate URL: http://macromates.com/ []

Where’s the menu for this? I’m looking in the ‘Fonts and Colors’ under preferences but changing the opacity of various things seems to have no effect.

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Forgive me, but just because the feature is there it doesn’t mean you have to use. How usable is it to code in a semi-transparent window?

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@Jack Danger - You have to change the background transparency for several items, depending on how many syntax parses you have running for the background setting.

Like in my theme, I had to change the overall background (it’s one of the first boxes at the top), and then I also had to change it for a couple syntax rules like ruby source, source, etc.

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I agree with Mazdak. It has a neato factor but seems that trying to have anything useful in the background would just be distracting (i.e. watching Southpark) or unusable (i.e. if the tried to put a cheat-sheet behind it for quick reference text-on-text would be difficult to read).

So it gets a +1 for neat. A -2 for useless.

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That wallpaper is pretty cool - where’d you get that?

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  • Nathan
  • Apr 16th

Just curious, but where did you get that wallpaper? Kind of dig its style.

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The wallpaper is from a program that automatically changes your desktop backgrounds from a pool of “high quality backgrounds”.

You can check out the application at http://www.desktoptopia.com

I love it :)

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Wow - transparency!!

Does TextMate do split windows yet?

Oh.

///ark

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  • Mark Wilden
  • Apr 16th
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