That's a great tip Rich! I often have multiple terminals open, and when looking over at the one that has lost focus, I'm always activating it to see what the results are.
When I'm messing around with .Xdefaults, I sometimes forget that commenting out is an exclamation, rather than a hash. So to reduce typing if I want to test things out, part of my .Xdefaults looks like this:
! Aterm*transparent: false
Aterm*transparent: true
Still, I have some annoying lagging and tearing, but that's only with terminals and Xfbdev. The rest of the standard xprogs are fine. It's usable now, but just bugs me a bit.
I like the way the JWM window manager hides it, by using a wire-frame drag instead. Kind of wish that FLWM had a wire-frame drag option.