help with "xterm", changing font size? [solved]

[swooshOnLn]

Hey, I have been trying to follow the output of "xterm --help" to figure otu how to chang the font, font size, and even bg colors and such, but for the life of me cannot figure it out. I have searched wiki, and I didnt find anything. Anybody have a guid or somethign that I could read?

[jure1873]

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xterm -font "*bitstream vera sans mono*medium-r*"

[nephros]

If it's a tue xterm hold Control and right-click into xterm to change the font size on-the-fly.

From the command line, use -fn and a X font specification string to set the font.
A font specification looks like:
-lfp-bright-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-15

The different fields between the hyphens set specific properties like family, name, point size, slant, pixel size, encoding etc.
The canonical tool to chose fonts is xfontsel, which will let you construct such a string.

As for colours, -fg is for foreground and -bg is for background, and those options will take parameters from the output of the "showrgb" tool. Its probalby easier to chose from a palette on the web.

If we put it all together, we get something like this:

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xterm -bg black -fg LavenderBlush4 -fn '-lfp-bright-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-15'

You can also use the ~/.Xdefaults file to set these permanently, but there you have to use "X Resource Strings"; the relevant ones for your questions read like this:

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XTerm*font:          -lfp-bright-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-15
XTerm*background:    black
XTerm*foreground:    white

BTW, the xterm man page should be a bit easier to grasp than the --help output.

HTH, feel free to follow-up with any questions you have on this.

[swooshOnLn]

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xterm -font "*bitstream vera sans mono*medium-r*"

does not seem to work for me, the text is still small, even if i change medium to "large" or such.

the seccond example works. The text is still small however, what would you add to that command line to make the text larger?

[nephros]

As said, you have to encode it in the font string.
for example for Helvetica 14:
-adobe-helvetica-*-r-*-*-14-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1

Note that you can't just use any size, the font size must be present on your system. That's why I recommended using xfontsel.

[BitJam]

You might want to emerge xtermcontrol which is a small program that lets you modify the xterm settings from within the xterm itself. This makes adjusting things much easier and it has a more limited set of options which makes things easier too. You can adjust more than one thing at a time which makes adjusting the colors doable.

Next, in a separate window, try doing:

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$ cat $(locate fonts.alias) | less

This will give you a list of font aliases that will be easier to type in. If you want just the aliases and not the fonts they correspond to, use:

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$ cat $(locate fonts.alias) | cut -d " " -f 1 | less

It's not perfect but it gives you a good place to start from. As others have said xlsfonts gives a complete listing of all fonts available but this can sometimes feel overwhelming.

[swooshOnLn]

ok thanks guys.

[swooshOnLn]

You might want to emerge xtermcontrol which is a small program that lets you modify the xterm settings from within the xterm itself. This makes adjusting things much easier and it has a more limited set of options which makes things easier too. You can adjust more than one thing at a time which makes adjusting the colors doable.

Next, in a separate window, try doing:

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$ cat $(locate fonts.alias) | less

This will give you a list of font aliases that will be easier to type in. If you want just the aliases and not the fonts they correspond to, use:

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$ cat $(locate fonts.alias) | cut -d " " -f 1 | less

It's not perfect but it gives you a good place to start from. As others have said xlsfonts gives a complete listing of all fonts available but this can sometimes feel overwhelming.

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bash: locate: comand not found

[BitJam]

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bash: locate: comand not found

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# emerge slocate
# nano /etc/updatedb.conf
# updatedb

You just gotta have locate if you are gonna use Linux. It maintains a database of (almost) all files on your machine so you can quickly find the full path of a file given only the filename.

Anyway, here is a quick alternative for now:

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# cat $(find /usr/share/fonts -name fonts.alias) | less