Transparency in Ptyxis

If you’re giving the flatpak version of the new GNOME terminal emulator Ptyxis (formerly Prompt) a spin, you might be wondering how to turn on transparency. After all, the README states that transparency is supported.

Fortunately, the issue was raised previously, and Christian gave us the command to set transparency for a profile of a given uuid. You can find this uuid by going into the Ptyxis preferences, heading to the “Profiles” tab and selecting “Edit…” from the vertical ellipsis menu on the profile in question.

Two Minor Problems

First, the command given contains references to “Prompt” instead of “Ptyxis”. This is an easy fix, we can just replace every instance of “Prompt” with “Ptyxis”. So the command becomes:

flatpak run --command=gsettings org.gnome.Ptyxis.Devel set org.gnome.Ptyxis.Devel.Profile:/org/gnome/Ptyxis/Devel/Profiles/${uuid}/ opacity 0.8 

Second, it would be nice if we didn’t have to poke around in the Preferences UI to get the uuid of the active profile. Fortunately, we can get the active profile from gsettings with the following command:

flatpak run --command=gsettings org.gnome.Ptyxis.Devel get org.gnome.Ptyxis.Devel default-profile-uuid 

Change Transparency for the Active Profile

If we combine the two previous commands, we can change transparency for the active profile in a one-liner:

flatpak run --command=gsettings org.gnome.Ptyxis.Devel set org.gnome.Ptyxis.Devel.Profile:/org/gnome/Ptyxis/Devel/Profiles/$(flatpak run --command=gsettings org.gnome.Ptyxis.Devel get org.gnome.Ptyxis.Devel default-profile-uuid | cut -f2 -d\')/ opacity 0.8