Query regarding terminal use and a minimal desktop.
 

Hi.

Been a while, but I am back in the fray.

I am looking to have a very minimalist desktop... no icons for a start, a task bar would be nice.

With that in mind, I am also looking for something a little more specific. Probbably using eterm (for its transparency) and the screen command, I would like to have the desktop showing as a mix of midnight commander (or similar) and bash. To be honest, I would like to have this without any of the trappings of the eterm terminal window (no borders, toolbar, taskbar or buttons). I would also like this to be a transparent layer over the background (eterm), but to only gain mouse focus upon a certain keystroke, allowing normal mouse foucs to be reserved for the window manager.

unfortunately, I am not very good with code, or I woud be attempting something like this myself.

Is this possible, is it simple, is there anything that does this already or should I just give up.

No desktop is going to do all of this out of the box, but some of the window managers like Fluxbox or some of the other Blackbox derivatives are capable of doing most what you want. For a terminal, you might check out Aterm, which is a bit lighter weight than Eterm and has many similar capabilities. I know Fluxbox is highly configurable, provided your willing to read the documentation and do a bit of tinkering with its config files.

What is going to be most difficult (I think) is getting the borderless windows to gain focus on a specific set of keystrokes. Of course that may just be my lack of tinkering with Fluxbox.

thank you for the response. I thought it may have been down to the WM. The trickiest part will be getting the WM to gain focus while the terminal window is sharing the space.

According to the Fluxbox documentation, you can set up keys to move forward and backwards through the windows, so this might be a way to do what you want. What I don't think you can do is bind keys to a specific windows, at least not the way I understand how Fluxbox does things.