| Department of Computing | Imperial College |
| Customising Xterms | |
This is a non-technical introduction to the Xterm application for the
X Window system. It is intended to give some idea of what xterms can do
and how they can be customised to each users own taste, but it is not
a full guide to doing so. The technical details are left to the manual
pages for xterms and X
(specifically the sections on X Resources and Options). Like all
Linux manual pages these can often be difficult to read and always have a
web like stucture leading to other
manual pages that usually contain pertinent information.
The Xterm is one of the most used of all X applications. Its basic function is to give a terminal interface to the user, in the same way a dumb VT100 terminal would, but to supply it in a window on a graphics screen. Xterms can emulate many different types of terminal (including graphics TEK terms), and display them in many different ways with different fonts and font sizes, and with weird numbers of rows and columns if you like, and have configurable scroll-back buffer, colours, etc.
Like most things under X, the look and feel of the xterm is controlled by its X-resources. All colours, fonts and font sizes, even the menus, can be customized.
If you need to quickly change the way that your xterm scrolls or wraps, then holding down the Control key and middle mouse button together, while the mouse pointer is over the xterm will display a configuration menu. From here you can do things like turn the scroll bar on and off or change how it scrolls. The best way to find out what the options do is to try them and see what happens. Fortunately, most of the options are toggles so selecting them again should put things back to the way they were.
If you want to change the font size, hold down the Control key and the right hand mouse button within the xterm window.This will display the VT font menu and you can select the font size you want. Tiny really is tiny though!
Alternatively, a command to open a window with a larger font size is:
xterm -font 10x20 &
You can try selecting other sizes by putting different numbers in, but some combinations will give errors.
editres utility.
The program xfontsel will let you explore a wealth of X fonts.
In the end you'll need to edit a file called .Xdefaults
or .Xresources in your home directory.
The utility xrdb can be used to reload the
database if you wish your changes to take immediate effect:
xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources
(applications only read from the resource database when they start up, and the database is only read from the file when xrdb is run, so changes will not take effect until you have reloaded your resource file AND restarted the application or, until you have logged out and in again).
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© CSG / 2000 /
help@doc /
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