The default terminal about broke my eyes the first time I started it up, mainly due to the small font. Since I -like- using xterm, I wanted to fix things.

First, I needed a readable font. With the mouse pointer in the window, press Ctrl-right-click and hold the click to get a menu that includes different font sizes. Selecting 'Medium' or 'Large' produces a more readable font size--though with Large you'll need to slide the taskbar off to the right to see the bottom of the window. Release the mouse button when the pointer is over the menu item you want to select.

Next was to set the defaults for this application under X-Windows so that I could have it be decent-looking every time I fired it up. The X server on the default Xandros looks for a file called .Xresources in the user's home directory when X-Windows starts up a session and merges it with the system's X-Windows settings. So I could put all my customizations into a this file and have them across reboots and restarts of the application.

The X-Windows options specific to xterm are documented in the xterm manpage, but not in a way that makes sense to the uninitiated, unfortunately. The X-Window User HOWTO gives a good introduction to using X resources to configure how your applications look and behave at:

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XWindow-User-HOWT … onfig.html

In my case, I wanted mostly to set the font, but I also wanted some window history (for times like when 'ls' overflows the window and I don't feel like looking at things a page at a time by piping it into less) and a scrollbar to move through that history.

Here's what I put in my .Xresources file (in my home directory,

xterm*Font: -adobe-*-medium-r-*-*-*-*-*-*-m-90-*-*
xterm*foreground: LawnGreen
xterm*background: black
xterm*cursorColor: PaleGoldenrod
xterm*scrollBar: true
xterm*saveLines: 500
xterm*rightScrollBar: true
xterm*scrollbar.Background: SlateGray
xterm*scrollbar.Foreground: CadetBlue1
xterm*scrollbar.thickness: 6

Now, that font line looks like a mess to type, but I have to admit I cheated. There's a program called xfontsel that lets you look at fonts and pick the one you want, and it gives you the proper string for it. To give it a whirl, go to your terminal and type:

xfontsel &

You'll get a very crude GUI app that lets you select different properties of a font in very techie terms, and see what the prospective font looks like. It's not a super-friendly app, but it does the job. One quirk is that if you've selected options that put you in a corner on fonts, in order to get previously available options to re-appear you need to select the * on that particular drop-down list, release the mouse to let the menu close, then re-open it to see the options available again. Un-selecting options by shifting each item back to a * progressively opens your options back up again.

Now, you don't need to select every item about your font. You can leave some or most of the items as a *. Also, the font displayed will change as you change the different item selections. If you're getting a non-Latin character set, you can see if there's a Latin character set by selecting an encoding option (the last item) like setting it to 1 and seeing if a Latin font appears.

Once you've found a font that'll do, click on the Select button. This will put the font selection string into your mouse's cut-and-paste buffer. Go to where you're editing your .Xresources file and press the middle mouse button to put the string into the current insertion point (press both mouse buttons simultaneously if you're using a two-button mouse--it may take a couple of tries to get the timing right. If it doesn't paste properly, see if Select is still highlighted in the xfontsel window. If not, something else got put into the mouse buffer by accident. Click Select and try again.) If the mouse buffer doesn't work for you, run xfontsel like this:

xfontsel -print

Then, once you have your font, click the Quit button in xfontsel. It'll quit, and print out the font string for you in the terminal window. If you want it to write it to a file instead, you can do something like:

xfontsel -print >>fontsIlike.txt

to have it print the font selected when you press the quit button to a file, where it will append another font name each time you run xfontsel this way.

Now you may wonder where I'm getting color names like "LawnGreen" and "CadetBlue1". They're in a text file:

/usr/share/X11/rgb.txt

Take a look at it and pick your own colors. Put them into your .Xresources file. To see changes you've made to the file since X has started up, you need to get X to 'read them in' using the following command:

xrdb -merge .Xresources

Then you can start up a new xterm and see how it looks:

xterm

If you want to open it up and still be able to type in your original xterm window while it's open, use:

xterm &

The '&' tells the shell to start your command in a new process, then return to the prompt. If you want the other window to hang around after you've closed the first xterm window, use:

nohup xterm &

nohup means "no hang-up" meaning that when the parent process (your original xterm window) terminates, it doesn't send a hang-up signal to the new process, which would command it to quit along with the parent. Nohup lets it keep running even when the parent dies.

You can define how you want other X-Windows applications to look using this same file. You can also define mouse and keyboard behaviors. For some examples of what you can do, take a look at the files in /etc/X11/app-defaults.

Enjoy!