Patrick

The best method I could find is enabling the X-Ray and disabling the Sel.: Wireframe in the Viewport settings.

Patrick

You can do several things to help with the sort of thing you show.
In the Display menu of your viewport enable backface culling. In the Filter menu disable HN Mesh. Both of these will help you see through to your image.
If you still want transparency create a material with transparency and assign it to the mesh and switch to Gouraud shading.
There is also the X-ray option in the Attributes manager but with a HyperNurbs object in the scene if you are in the habit of switching that off and on it can be a bit of a pain.

I usually work in X-ray, with Gouraud Shading+Lines, although yeah you can also set the material to be transparent.

Well the other cool thing you an do with a transparent material is add the transparency channel to the HUD, set it to always show and you have a transparent/opaque switch right there in the editor window.

The alpha channel tip only works on a PC, not on a Mac. Don't know what petz_e is on.

My last post post about the alpha channel, I was getting confused there and thinking about the back image in one of the orthographic views. petz_e was asking about the perspective view. Disregard.