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Is there a version of putty that has a transparent background with opaque text? If not is there a way to do this?

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As far as I can tell, it is impossible to do this with windows. This is not so good. Perhaps I should switch to OSX. – Specto Apr 2 '09 at 20:46
This should probably be on one of the other Stack Exchange sites... – Seth Johnson Nov 3 '10 at 19:46

migrated from stackoverflow.com Sep 3 '11 at 23:51

12 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

Further to Ibrahim's post, I can confirm that PuTTy Tray does transparency.

Under "Window" settings you get "Window transparency options". Just lower the value from 255 to get a transparent window in PuTTy.

It's the best solution, because it behaves like PuTTy, plus you got some nice settings to play with :)

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The problem here is that the entire window becomes transparent, including the text. I interpret the question as wanting only the background to be transparent, not the text in the window. – bigbadonk420 Mar 19 at 12:02
up vote 6 down vote

Mintty is a terminal emulator for cygwin that supports transparency -- you can install it straight from the cygwin setup utility.

Here's what mine looks like...

mintty

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Mintty also has a "Glass" mode where white text is opaque and a black background turns into Aero glass, which makes for a sort of seamless look. To make it reasonably usable, the glass colour needs to be set as dark as possible in the "Window Colour and Appearance" control panel. mintty.googlecode.com/svn/images/glass.jpg – ak2 Feb 8 '11 at 17:39
up vote 5 down vote accepted

I have found the solution. Windows XP and below do not provide the functionality to do so, however someone from Japan wrote a patch for Putty to allow for aero and alpha background transparency. I believe it may be hardcoded in for Vista use only however because I can't get it to work with my Windows 7 boxes, and I refuse to use vista :). If you can help me out with this minor problem I would appreciate it.

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=http://ice.hotmint.com/putty/&ei=XSzoSb7mEYTCtwf43uWYBg&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dputty%2Baero%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26hs%3DKwN

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Oh, it does work never mind, I just have a hard time reading japanese, especially with unsupported characters on my system. Oh and not being able to read japanese, that's a problem too. Anyone want to translate? This is perfect :) – Specto Apr 17 '09 at 7:36
Awesome, this is pretty cool. I wish more apps used glass. – Ibrahim May 17 '09 at 20:21
Oh by the way, if you just delete the file putty.lng from the directory, it goes back to English. Nice find. – Ibrahim May 17 '09 at 20:27
Just remember to restart Putty (after saving the setting) to get Glass effect, as per the direction. Otherwise it will seem to be not working. – polyglot Jul 22 '11 at 18:48
up vote 5 down vote

Putty Tray does what you want, I think. Check it out, it's pretty nice.

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yes sir, works perfectly on XP – lkraav Jul 6 '10 at 1:37
up vote 4 down vote

I havn't seen it avaiable in any versions of Putty.

But you can achive this by using Console 2 in combination with Cygwin.

Set your cygwin.bat to your shell in Console2.

Turn on transparency in the Console 2 config, and then just use ssh tools in cygwin as normal.

You can also use cygwin's rxvt and turn on transparency without having to be inside cygwin's X11.

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Sounds nice, but I really wanted to keep Cygwin off of this particular computer and use something simple like putty. – Specto Apr 2 '09 at 19:35
I just tried it out, nice program, but it doesn't provide opaque text, the whole window becomes transparent. – Specto Apr 2 '09 at 19:38
up vote 2 down vote

There's a program named ZOC SSH Terminal that can have a partially transparent window (it has about the same features as SecureCRT, is commercial also).

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up vote 1 down vote

It's pay software but SecureCRT does that. Putty on steroids.

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up vote 1 down vote

I just use Kitty http://www.9bis.net/kitty/?page=Welcome&zone=en

give it a try, you can set background with transparency.

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up vote 0 down vote

Google is our friend: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/transparency.html

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this is full window transparency, not opaque text. Doesn't work for high transparency. – Specto Apr 2 '09 at 19:19
up vote 0 down vote

This patch should do background-only transparency.

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"Note that this is integrated background image support, not a transparency hack, so by design you can't see other windows or desktop icons behind the terminal window. " – Specto Apr 2 '09 at 19:33
So this is not true transparency. – Specto Apr 2 '09 at 19:34
1  
Link may be dead. – Derek Mar 11 '10 at 23:45
up vote 0 down vote

I use msys which works nicely with Console2. For example, when you install Git for Windows using the msys git distribution, ssh is installed as well (git+ssh:). Then the only step is to setup a new tab in console2 using the Git Bash shortcut call (see the menu entry property for the full cmd call).

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up vote 0 down vote

Here is a pseudo-transparency version, win32 native, no '3rd-party' tools required.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/transputty/

I've used it now for several years under winXP and have enjoyed the unaltered text with a peudo-transparent background, or texture. The colors are also blended if used.

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