xterm – select font name and size from command line and set it as default
I have been very busy last week and specially yesterday with 20 hours of continueous work, but managed to get this working :).
When you right click on Xterm with Ctrl pressed, there pops up a menu for selecting the size of the font. I have always wondered how to set this as default font and/or use this from the command line. So I searched my old homedir and looked for few of the docs that I had to get the information. Here is what I found.
First we need to find the fonts that are installed to use them, so here is the command to do that:
Hack1004$xlsfonts |more
-adobe-courier-bold-o-normal–10-100-75-75-m-60-iso10646-1
-adobe-courier-bold-o-normal–10-100-75-75-m-60-iso8859-1
-adobe-courier-bold-o-normal–11-80-100-100-m-60-iso10646-1
-adobe-courier-bold-o-normal–11-80-100-100-m-60-iso8859-1
-adobe-courier-bold-o-normal–12-120-75-75-m-70-iso10646-1
-adobe-courier-bold-o-normal–12-120-75-75-m-70-iso8859-1
-adobe-courier-bold-o-normal–14-100-100-100-m-90-iso10646-1
-adobe-courier-bold-o-normal–14-100-100-100-m-90-iso8859-1……
Now you can select the font that you want to use and then we are ready to go.
For selecting the font from the command line invocation of the xterm, the fontname can be specified with -fn and font size with -fs.
Example:
xterm -fn -adobe-courier-bold-o-normal–14-100-100-100-m-90-iso8859-1
xterm -fn 8×16
Now for the same to be set as default. The defaults for the xterm can be set in the terminal settings that are read by the xrdb program. These can go in the ~/.Xdefaults . You can see the current one in use by issuing the command:
appres
and then set them using the following entries in .Xdefaults
xtermsaveLines: 10000
xtermscrollBar: true
xtermrightScrollBar: true
xtermjumpScroll: true
xtermcursorColor: red
xtermcolorBD: darkblue
xtermcolorBDMode: true
xtermhighlightColor: yellow
xtermactiveIcon: false
xtermawaitInput: true
xtermscrollTtyOutput: false
xtermscrollKey: truextermBackground: DarkSlateBlue
xtermForeground: black
and run
xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults
BTW, you can also change the font size using the shift plus/minus.
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Authored By Amit Agarwal
Amit Agarwal, Linux and Photography are my hobbies.Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.