aterm background

Message

adssse · #1 Post by **adssse** » 2006-02-07 20:47

I was wondering how to change aterm so that it automatically has a black background and white foreground. I have searched on the net but they refer me to .Xdefaults, which I cannot locate using ls -a. I found that I can execute it as

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aterm -bg black -fg white

but I would like it to do this automatically when I open it. Thanks for any assistance.

Scotti · #2 Post by **Scotti** » 2006-02-08 00:14

You may create ~/.Xdefaults yourself and put that line in it.

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$ echo "aterm -bg black -fg white" > ~/.Xdefaults

Another solution is to edit wherever you launch aterm from. For example, if you click on a desktop icon, edit the launch line from "aterm" to "aterm -bg black -fg white".

Here's an article on tweaking more aterm settings.

adssse · #3 Post by **adssse** » 2006-02-09 05:09

Thanks for your reply. I checked out the link you provided and followed what it said. I created .Xdefaults in my home directory and entered the following lines

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 aterm*background: black
aterm*foreground: white

I also tried entering:
aterm -bg black -fg white

After doing this aterm still starts up with a white background and black text. I am using Sarge and fluxbox and have tried starting aterm from the menu and command line with no luck. I must be doing something wrong but I am not sure what.[/code]

Scotti · #4 Post by **Scotti** » 2006-02-09 05:33

That's weird the .Xdefaults didn't work.

One thing you should make sure of is if you're editing the correct menu file. The default Fluxbox menu is generated in /etc/X11/fluxbox, called fluxbox-menu. If you haven't already, copy that menu to your home fluxbox directory and rename to "menu".

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$ cp /etc/X11/fluxbox/fluxbox-menu ~/.fluxbox/menu

After this edit /etc/X11/fluxbox/init as root to make sure Fluxbox uses the menu in your home directory when you log in as your user. A line near the bottom should look like this:

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session.menuFile: ~/.fluxbox/menu

So from now on edit ~/.fluxbox/menu if you want to make any changes to your menu.

Here's my menu entry which makes aterm look pretty cool:

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aterm -sl 3000 -tr -trsb -si -sk -sh 60 -fg white -bg black -fn fixed

Scotti · #5 Post by **Scotti** » 2006-02-09 05:38

One other thing I just remembered. I had problems getting Fluxbox to make my custom changes with whichever version of Fluxbox is used with Sarge. This might not be the issue with aterm, but I'm running Sid which includes the latest version of Fluxbox (0.9.14-1). I've had no issues with it so far.

Maybe try upgrading to Sid if you're not using a production machine? Just a thought.

Lux · #6 Post by **Lux** » 2006-02-09 10:47

After doing this aterm still starts up with a white background and black text.

Looks like your ~/.Xdefaults isn't being read. If you use some startup file to start fluxbox (like ~/.xinitrc or ~/.xsession) you could try adding there the following line:

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xrdb -load $HOME/.Xdefaults

Or you could rename ~/.Xdefaults to ~/.Xresources and see if that makes any difference. I use ~/.Xresources and it works fine.

Here's the aterm section from my ~/.Xresources:

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XTerm*saveLines: 10000                                                                                                       
aterm*foreground: white                                                                                                      
aterm*background: black                                                                                                      
aterm*font: terminus-iso8859-15-14                                                                                           
aterm*transparent: true                                                                                                      
aterm*transpscrollbar:true                                                                                                   
aterm*shading: 60

This configuration uses the "pseudo transparency" for aterm's background and scrollbar and the iso8859-15 coded size 14 fonts from the xfonts-terminus package (see "xlsfonts | more" to list the available fonts on your system).

Harold · #7 Post by **Harold** » 2006-02-10 05:05

You are attempting to launch aterm in reverse video mode, so you want to use the -rv switch in the command line. To have this done automatically, you want to add the following alias to ~/.bashrc.

alias aterm='aterm -rv'

Then do . ~/.bashrc to instruct bash to rescan this file. (Or, do what a Windows user would do: log out and log back in.)

adssse · #8 Post by **adssse** » 2006-02-10 15:28

I was able to get aterm working the way I wanted it to by using the ~/.Xresources method (even tried a few different colors woohoo). I noticed that in /etc/X11/Xsession.options it specifies allow-user-resources, but doesnt say anything about defaults. Is this the reason why .Xresources would work and .Xdefaults would not? I am happy with the way it is working, I am just curious. Thanks again for everyones help, I learned quite a bit.