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Date:      Fri, 11 Mar 2005 02:40:44 +0200
From:      Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>
To:        Nathan Kinkade <nkinkade@ub.edu.bz>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: How to identify xterm font
Message-ID:  <20050311004044.GA25591@gothmog.gr>
In-Reply-To: <20050310230355.GE3647@gentoo-npk.bmp.ub>
References:  <slrnd2vu35.1bit.use-reply-to@sergei.homeunix.org> <20050310230355.GE3647@gentoo-npk.bmp.ub>

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On 2005-03-10 17:03, Nathan Kinkade <nkinkade@ub.edu.bz> wrote:
>On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 07:31:09AM +0000, Sergei Gnezdov wrote:
>> I like the size of the xterm window.  It is small and it uses very
>> easy to read font.  Unfortunately, it does not play very well with
>> emacs.

Just FYI,

I usually start a screen(1) session within ALL my xterm windows with a
TERM environment variable of "vt220", because this is available on all
the systems I commonly connect to through ssh(1).

Emacs within screen within xterm works absolutely *perfect*, after a bit
of tweaking to the key map is applied.  My ~/.emacs file contains, among
other things, the following keys:

    ;; Some bindings to make using Emacs nicer on vt220 terminals.
    (global-set-key "\C-h"          'backward-delete-char)
    (global-set-key [delete]        'delete-char)
    (global-set-key [deletechar]    'backward-delete-char)
    (global-set-key "\M-\C-h"       'backward-kill-word)
    ;;
    (global-set-key [home]          'beginning-of-line)
    (global-set-key [find]          'beginning-of-line)
    (global-set-key [end]           'end-of-line)
    (global-set-key [select]        'end-of-line)

CTRL-a and CTRL-e are ok when I'm working on the GNU bash command line,
but when I am in Emacs, I some times find it easier to hit END :-)

>> For these reasons I use Gnome terminal.  Gnome font is bigger, thus
>> it takes more space on the screen.  How do I identify which font is
>> used by xterm, so I can apply it for gnome terminal?

The default font used by xterm windows is 'fixed'.  Or whatever this has
been aliased to.  Its real font name can be found by grepping the
font.alias files under /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts for 'fixed':

    $ cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts
    $ grep -r '^fixed[[:space:]]' .
    ./cyrillic/fonts.alias:fixed -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-koi8-r
    ./misc/fonts.alias:fixed -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
    $

>> I also would like to know why my ~/.Xdefaults configuration is not
>> applied in Gnome.  It worked just fine in KDE and most other
>> environments.

Are you using an X11 desktop manager with Gnome?  This could explain
what you see.  When GDM, KDM or XDM is used to fire up the X server
*after* obtaining a username/password from a valid user, the default
script of actions that xinit runs is ~/.xsession or one that the
"desktop manager" chooses (for XDM this is Xsession from the directory
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm).

When you just type "startx" in a console window, a different script is
executed to start the X programs you will use.  This is teh ~/.xinitrc
script or /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc if the former doesn't exist.

It may be that one of these runs xrdb with ~/.Xdefaults but the other
doesn't -- and this would explain why you see a different behavior now.

- Giorgos



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