Setting an Emacs background image

Question

Emacs 23 just added the functionality to change the alpha value of the current frame to make it transparent. I just type the following command in .emacs:

(set-fra

Answer 1

I used to build from source just so I could use the patch at http://umiushi.com/~wac/bgex/, but that doesn't work on Mac (and probably not Windows). It allows you to put a different background on different buffers based on filename or major-mode. I liked it a lot.

One thing that almost works is to set the stipple for the default face M-x customize-face RET default RET to a file. For me this ends up being worse than nothing though since it only adds a background image to the portion of the buffer with text in it (at least on OS X). I learned about this by asking on emacs-devel http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2009-06/msg00477.html.

You may also find http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TransparentEmacs useful.

Answer 2

There is a way. Install Xfce terminal, which allows you set background image in terminal and start emacs in no-window-system mode from inside the terminal. Using screen/tmux (some sort of terminal muliplexer) you can dedicate a terminal session to emacs.

Answer 3

This doesn't appear possible at a glance. Below are the frame parameters that can be set:

• auto-raise
• auto-lower
• background-color
• border-color
• border-width
• cursor-color
• cursor-type
• font
• foreground-color
• icon-name
• icon-type
• internal-border-width
• menu-bar-lines
• mouse-color
• name
• scroll-bar-width
• title
• unsplittable
• vertical-scroll-bars
• visibility
• tool-bar-lines
• scroll-bar-foreground
• scroll-bar-background
• screen-gamma
• line-spacing
• left-fringe
• right-fringe
• wait-for-wm
• fullscreen
• font-backend
• alpha
• sticky