The watermark

The watermark

An image behind the terminal, off unless you point at one:

bothy config set workspace.background_image ~/pictures/bothy-watermark.png
bothy install

bothy ships no art. The trick wants an image composited where a particular pane will be, which depends on your screen and your layout — so a picture bothy chose would be wrong on most machines, and the one it used to ship was a Tux it had no business redistributing uncredited.

Why this works at all

A terminal cannot scope a background image to one pane. But with a fixed layout, the image can be made to land on one: a mostly transparent canvas the shape of your window, with the art composited at the percentage where the pane sits. Ghostty's background-image-fit = stretch maps that canvas onto the window, so the percentages hold at any resolution.

Do not reach for fit = none with a corner anchor. That positions in absolute pixels and is correct on exactly one monitor.

Making one

Any tool that composites will do; this is ImageMagick. Say you want art in the bottom-right, where the cockpit profile puts the shell pane:

# A transparent canvas the shape of your screen, art placed at the fraction
# where the pane sits. 1920x1080 here; use your own.
magick -size 1920x1080 xc:none \
  \( art.png -resize 232x324 \) -geometry +1621+626 -composite \
  ~/pictures/bothy-watermark.png

Those numbers put a 232×324 image inside the shell pane on a 1920×1080 screen. Yours will differ; the arithmetic is fraction of the window, so measure once and it holds when you resize.

For source art you already have, docs/images/bothy-dark.png in this repository is the shelter from the README.

Tuning it

The opacity bothy writes is deliberately low. It is not a config key, because every other Ghostty setting is tuned the same way — put your own value in ~/.config/bothy/overrides/ghostty/ghostty.conf and it is appended after bothy's, so it wins:

background-image-opacity = 0.12

When it does not appear

bothy doctor fails if workspace.background_image names a file that is not there, because Ghostty says nothing about a background-image it cannot find. It draws nothing, which looks identical to "the opacity is too low" and sends you tuning a setting that was never the problem.