PnH: Xterm configuration

Overview

Xterm is the native Terminal emulator of X window system. This article will provide some useful options to configure Xterm to be usable and comfortable.

NOTE: This article was written for Arch Linux but can be applied to other Distros with some different approachs.

Xterm configuration

Config file location

Xterm is configured though X resources file ~/.Xresources , this file may not exist by default, you can manually create it with any text editor.

Loading config file

Most Display manager will load ~/.Xresources file on login, if you use startx , you will need to add the line:

xrdb ~/.Xresources

to your xinitrc file.
If you want your changes to take effect, you need to restart X Server or reload X Resources file manually.

Reverse color

Add this line to your X resources file to enable black background:

XTerm*reverseVideo: on

Enable UTF-8

Xterm with UTF-8 can be access via uxterm command, but you can configure xterm to accept UTF-8 characters.

First make sure that your locale settings are correct for UTF-8. Sample UTF-8 locale configuration:

Uncomment the line in /etc/locale.gen :

...
#en_SG ISO-8859-1
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
#en_US ISO-8859-1
...

Generate locales as root:

$ locale-gen

Edit /etc/locale.conf:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

After configured locales, add this line to your X resources file to enable UTF-8:

XTerm*locale: true

Fix 'alt' key

If you use the 'alt' key for your shortcut, add this line to X resources file:

XTerm*metaSendsEscape: true

Disable bold fonts

Bold characters are sometimes hard to read on small font. Disable it:

XTerm*allowBoldFonts: false

Change title of terminal

This is a small bash script to change title of terminal:

/usr/bin/title

#!/usr/bin/bash
xwit -id $WINDOWID -name "$1"

Usage example:

$ title "my new title"

xwit can be installed from aur

Automatic transparency

To enable transparency, you need to install the package transset-df and a composite manager, I recommend using Compton because it is stable and runs smoother than others.

To install Compton , first make sure that Composite extension is enabled for the X Server. Run:

$ xdpyinfo | grep Composite

If there is no output, add the Composite option to the Extensions section of xorg.conf:

/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "Extensions"
        Option  "Composite" "true"
EndSection

Install compton :

$ pacman -S compton

To use compton , you need to start it manually :

$ compton

Or you can add it to xinitrc file:

/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

...
exec compton &
...

When your have installed compton, add this line to ~/.bashrc file to enable automatic transparency:

[ -n "$XTERM_VERSION" ] && transset-df --id "$WINDOWID" > /dev/null

Bash interaction prompt decoration

This is a sample bash interaction prompt configuration:

/etc/bash.bashrc

...
if [ `whoami` = 'root' ]; then
 PS1='\[\e[1;33m\][\u@\h \W]\$\[\e[0m\] '
else
 PS1='\[\e[1;32m\][\u@\h \W]\$\[\e[0m\] '
fi
PS2='> '
PS3='> '
PS4='+ '
...