Mate terminal change background transparency programmatically?

I've decided to experiment with making my life more beautiful by having background images scraped from *flickr* that change every 30 minutes together with transparent terminal and editor windows. However, this has some downsides. Occasionally the images are too visible and impede editing, so I want to tweak transparency. Thus I want a quick way to change transparency in my editor (emacs: done) and my terminal (mate-terminal, not-done). This appears to be possible in *gnome-terminal* (https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/24616/changing-gnome-terminal-transparency-with-a-command-in-ubuntu#24618) . My understanding was that mate-terminal was forked from gnome-terminal. " You can use gconftool with the key /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/background_type (you might have to use a different profile name than "Default"): " But I don't seem to be able to find any settings that change when I change background. meld <( { gconftool -R / | sort ; gsettings list-schemas | xargs -n 1 gsettings list-recursively | sort } ) <( { sleep 20 ; gconftool -R / | sort ; gsettings list-schemas | xargs -n 1 gsettings list-recursively | sort } ) # Source code I tried reading some sort code. This looks like a good starting point: https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-terminal/blob/078d0b1fdac2e50dfa4411b612e78a4be134e47d/src/terminal-screen.c#L1111 The profile looks to get found like so

= g_value_get_object (value);

The reference manual for this function call can be found [here](https://developer.gnome.org/gobject/unstable/gobject-Standard-Parameter-and-Value-Types.html#g-value-get-object) but the [documentation for GValue](https://developer.gnome.org/gobject/unstable/gobject-Generic-values.html#GValue) seems a little opaque. Anyway yes, does anyone know enough to get an answer for this? # Possible lines of attack * Use *btrfs* snapshots to discover exactly what changed * Use *strace *to work out what is going on (strace output is a bit noisy because of this being an X application) * Read the code mode # Alternatives * Switch to gnome-terminal. I'm disinclined to do this because something that is unlikely to change. My understanding is that MATE was forked because gnome was changing too fast so this seems like a good choice. * Switch to another terminal. I'm not open to this. But don't really know which terminal to switch to * Intelligently render backgrounds to ensure that they are tinted correctly * Have keybindings that modify the *background* rather than the terminal