HOWTO have terminator become your wallpaper

This Howto is made by AlexelA, and is from this forum thread.

There is so much unused screen real estate when you first boot your computer.
Sure you might have a detailed Conky setup running, a taskbar, and a cute little clock in the bottom right-hand corner, but let's face it, 80% of your desktop isn't being used and you'll have to click on something or use some keyboard shortcut key for anything to happen.

What if I told you that life needn't be this way? That, if you wanted to, you could have Terminator sitting at the bottom layer of whatever other applications you might be using, hungrily waiting for a “man touch” command, or perhaps a random series of ctrl+shift+e and ctrl+shift+o presses to see just how small of a terminal section you can squeeze out of it?

This Howto will help you transform your freshly booted CrunchBang system from this rather bland affair to this, which might inspire you to do this, which will lead you to do this, and will inevitably have your blood pressure on the rise as you type this.

Open the file ~/.config/terminator/config, also accessible through the menu under Preferences –> Terminator config –> edit config file, then paste these lines over anything that might be living in there.

scrollbar_position=disabled
foreground_color=#ffffff
font=Mono 9
palette=#000000000000:#aaaa00000000:#0000aaaa0000:#aaaa55550000:#00000000aaaa:#aaaa0000aaaa:#0000aaaaaaaa:#aaaaaaaaaaaa:#555555555555:#ffff55555555:#5555ffff5555:#ffffffff5555:#55555555ffff:#ffff5555ffff:#5555ffffffff:#ffffffffffff
background_type=transparent
borderless=true
background_darkness=0.5
titlebars=false
handle_size=0

Like all good goaltenders around the world, save.

You will be making two changes to this file, hence this Step has been broken down into relevant Subdivisions 1-stroke-49-slash-9 and 1-stroke-67-slash-5.

Add this code to the <applications> section of your ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml file, also accessible through the menu under Preferences –> Openbox config –> edit rc.xml:

    <application name="terminator" class="Terminator">
      <decor>no</decor>
      <focus>yes</focus>
      <position>
         <x>left</x>
         <y>0</y>
      </position>
      <layer>below</layer>
      <desktop>all</desktop>
      <skip_taskbar>no</skip_taskbar>
      <maximized>vertical</maximized>
    </application>

Next, add this section to the <keyboard> section of the same file, (see the Configuring Keybindings page for further details):

<keybind key="W-t">
      <action name="Execute">
        <startupnotify>
          <enabled>true</enabled>
          <name>Terminal</name>
        </startupnotify>
        <command>terminator --geometry=1200x0</command>
      </action>
    </keybind>

You might have to tweak the first value in the geometry option depending on your screen resolution and the space that your conky might be taking up. I set the second value to 0 because the changes we made back in Subdivision 1-stroke-49-slash-9 took care of everything (q.v. <maximized>vertical</maximized>).

You might also want to add this to your <keyboard> section:

<keybind key="A-space">
      <action name="Iconify" />
    </keybind>

This will allow you to quickly minimize whatever applications you may have opened to get back to your now very useful wallpaper by pressing Alt-Space.