Configuration Menu

• To access the main menu, hold down the control key and click the left mouse button
• Ctrl-Middle Button is the terminal options (Preferences) - hint, you can set reverse video here.
• Ctrl-Right Button is the font options.

To scroll using the scrollbar, grab the grey bar with the middle button.

Startup Options

Start Xterm as a login shell (load /etc/profile and .bashrc (on redhat, at least))

xterm -l

Put the scrolbar on the right side of the term

xterm -rightbar

Use a visual Bell (screen flash) instead of a beep

xterm -vb

Change colours

xterm -fg <foreground colour> -bg <background colour>

Swap forground/background colours

xterm -rv

Run a program in Xterm

xterm -e <program name>

Use AntiAliasedFonts in Xterm!

xterm -bg white -fg black -fa "bitstream vera sans mono" -fs 8

Alt vs Meta

At some stage (eg xterm version 187 in Debian Unstable), xterm started treating keyboard input differently when the Alt key was pressed. (For PC keyboards, the Alt key has the "mod_1" X keyboard modifier set). For example, pressing Alt+x generates a "ø" and pressing Alt+q now generates "ñ". This isn't very good if you want to use the Alt key in emacs(1) in the terminal. The best solution for this is to add

XTerm*eightBitInput: false

to either $HOME/.Xresources (for a single user) or to /etc/X11/app-defaults/XTerm (for a system wide default).

Another solution (that isn't as tidy as the above) is to use xmodmap(1)

to tell X that your Alt key should generate Meta

xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_L = Meta_L'

For more information see xterm(1).