I've had semi-transparent terminal windows going on many years now. I keep them 80% opaque in the foreground, and drop it down to 75% opaque for inactive windows. I also apply a nice blur effect to the background (with the active window having a higher blur amount). It's really nice; lets me see what's behind the window, without detracting from the readability of the terminal itself.

Transparency without blur might be problematic though.

Blur is absolutely the key to transparency. I've found it's a balance: you can go for less blur, but you have to make the window more opaque. With more blur you can go more transparent with the same amount of readability/non-distraction.

I have to admit I have been using transparency more lately. It is great when you are quoting something or trying to duplicate a ui in html.

Granted, it is much more heavily used in screenshots than it is anything else. :)

I use transparency on terminals since I use X. Its not to bad if i dont have it, but on a tiling wm its the only way to see whats your background image ;)

Yeah, its useless. But a bit of candy is not to bad.

I have a large screen. With a semi transparent terminal I get the impression that my brain is better able to re-scan the screen for the content I was looking for. Especially if I have a vim session with several columns.

When I first saw them I thought transparent terminal windows were the coolest thing. Then I tried to use one...

So, as other commenters have pointed out, using blur and/or 80% opacity helps with this. One thing I haven't seen (with this terminal or any other) is to actually outline each character in black (assuming white on black color scheme). That would give some much needed contrast, while still allowing areas with no text to be visible without much or any blurring and perhaps not needing the opacity set so high.

Eterm does this. It does help, but it is kind of ugly.

I just tried this and I wasn't wowed by the effect. Back to a solid black background for me...

I allow slight transparency through terminal windows, perhaps 10%. This allows me to see motion in background windows, which is useful for keeping track of processes like lengthy compiles.

Why would it be absurd? Do you use a monochrome display? Because, let's face it, black/white is all you need. Or green/white.

Because backgrounds (or movies) like the ones shown in the video make the terminal text completely unreadable and reading the text on a terminal is kind of the whole point of it.

Edit: That sounded a little more negative than I meant it. I'm actually a fan of transparent or backgrounds, but I think they need a lot of tint/blur to them or they become distracting and/or make the text unreadable. This was evident in the video where I couldn't read a lot of the grey text once the background picts were enabled.

Though the use case for video still eludes me. :-)

I have the feeling that many people are distracted by the bad video. The terminal actually looks like this: http://www.bestubuntu.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/eae91__...

It's very clean and nice looking... I don't understand how this is distracting.