LinuxQuestions.org - [SOLVED] Alsamixer transparency (how I did it)

I wanted alsamixer to support transparency. Took a bit of googling and a wee bit of hacking, but nothing too hard. This guide probably relevant only to alsa-utils 1.0.21+.

Know your system
Make sure libncurses (development version with headers etc) is installed.

Run cat /proc/asound/version. This will tell you your alsa-utils version.

The dirty work
Download the source for your version of alsa-utils. Ubuntu users can find their source code at Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-utils

Extract it, go into alsa-utils*/alsamixer/. Edit colors.c. Look for the section void init_colors(int use_color). For each line that starts with init_pair( and has COLOR_BLACK as the second colour, change COLOR_BLACK to -1. Eg:

Code:

init_pair(1, COLOR_CYAN, COLOR_BLACK);

becomes

Code:

init_pair(1, COLOR_CYAN, -1);

Save colors.c. Run make. Copy the resulting alsamixer to /usr/local/bin.

Sources
https://www.prof-maad.org/blog/2009/...ent-alsamixer/
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=92518