The watermark

The watermark

An image behind the terminal, off unless one is configured:

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

bothy ships no art. The technique requires an image composited where a particular pane will be, which depends on the screen and the layout, so an image bothy chose would be positioned wrongly on most machines. It is also not bothy's place to redistribute somebody else's artwork.

How it works

A terminal cannot scope a background image to one pane. With a fixed layout the image can instead be made to land on one: a mostly transparent canvas the shape of the 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.

A single-colour image on a transparent ground works best: a logo or a line drawing rather than a photograph, which turns to mud at the opacity bothy uses.

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 is indistinguishable from an opacity set too low and leads to tuning a setting that was never the problem.

Swapping parts, and theming · Profiles