I'm sure this topic has been discussed many times before, but...

Are there any terminals that support REAL transparencies. That is, if I stick one terminal on top of the other, I should see the lower terminal (not the desktop background image). OS X does this quite nicely.

I've heard that this really can't be supported until X supports real transparency. Is this true?

Also, I'm sure we can all think of times when real transparency would be nice...but other times where psuedo transparency would also be nice.

Is there any terminal out that that supports both real AND pseudo transparency. I would like to be able to switch between the two.

I don't know of any terminal specifically that supports this - I would have thought it'd be either a DE/WM or X specific extension - quite a task for a single app to accomplish (keeping a 'record' of all layers of display beneath it). I do know that there are some X alternatives that are supposed to do this - or something like it. Check out XDirectFB.

While it is possible from someone to code it seperatly, its an extremely hard task, because its would require rewriting every driver out there.

But XFree v.5 is suppose to have off screen rendering, which allows real transparency, and neat OSX-like effects. Lets just hope they do it.