Configuring mrxvt and xterm

Due to the lack of time I never got the chance to configure them before but now I finally got to play with my terminals’ settings. As with most linux programs, the configure part is plain easy — all you have to do is to decypher a badly commented existing configuration file and you’re done!

Configuring xterm
The main problem with my xterm was that my font was way too small to be confortable to read. Besides that it was also set on a white background with a black foreground. The colors were a problem because running Centericq was a pain in the ass, good luck reading a bright yellow text on a white background.
As I was later to find out, xterm takes its configuration settings from a file called ~/.Xresources (notice the ~/, we’re in our home directory). This file is executed when starting the X server so placing our configuration options here is a good idea. My current options look like this:

XTerm*font: -*-fixed-medium-r-*-*-18-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
XTerm*background: black
XTerm*foreground: white
XTerm*pointerColor: red
XTerm*pointerColorBackground: black
XTerm*cursorColor: navy
XTerm*internalBorder: 3
XTerm*loginShell: true
XTerm*scrollBar: false
XTerm*scrollKey: true
XTerm*saveLines: 1000

Say, this solved our color problems but maybe all we want is to change the font size (which was the main problem actually). For this we’d start xterm by
$ xterm -font -*-fixed-medium-r-*-*-18-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*

The font name (which is not cryptic, by all means it’s not) was acquired by running an utility called xfontsel. Once we set our options there (fixed, 18 pt font, not bold) we can copy that info to the command line when running xterm. But maybe you don’t want to spend the rest of your lifetime writing all that things when all you want is a terminal with your prefered font. Excellent then! Open up ~/.bashrc and add the following line:

alias xterm='xterm -font -*-fixed-medium-r-*-*-18-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*'

OR, our last choice, try holding down Ctrl and right clicking the terminal. Magic.

Short and simple. Thanks to All about Linux for this.

Configuring mrxvt
We already have a terminal so why would we want to configure a second one? Well, because the second one has multi tabbing support and its name is not “I am here to rape your computer to death” (read: gnome-terminal or other tank-like applications).

Mrxvt has lots of configuration options including the possibility to add semi-transparent background images and custom background images for each terminal. The confguration file for mrxvt is ~/.mrxvtrc, but probably you don’t even have it. You can either create it by running $ touch .mrxvtrc and start writing down the settings you’d like (by guessing them of course) or by copying the /usr/X11R6/share/doc/mrxvt/xdefaults-sample.txt file to the above mentioned location. My config file looks like this (it’s not based on the xdefaults-sample file):

mrxvt*opacity: 1
mrxvt*OpacityDegree: 50
mrxvt*vt0*saveLines: 500
!how many terminals should we open by default?
mrxvt*initTermNumber: 1
mrxvt*protectSecondary: true
mrxvt*loginShell: true
mrxvt*scrollBar: false
mrxvt*transparent: true
mrxvt*transparentScrollbar: true
mrxvt*transparentTabbar: true
mrxvt*transparentMenubar: true
!mrxvt*foreground: darkgray
!mrxvt*background: darkgray
mrxvt*foreground: white
mrxvt*background: darkblue
!mrxvt*backgroundFade: 60
!mrxvt*fading: 0
!mrxvt*tintColor: darkblue
!mrxvt*textShadow: black
!mrxvt*textShadowMode: botright
! tab colors
mrxvt*tabForeground: black
mrxvt*tabBackground: white
! inactive tab colors
mrxvt*itabForeground: white
mrxvt*itabBackground: black
mrxvt*tabPixmap: false
mrxvt*syncTabTitle: true
mrxvt*hideTabbar: false
mrxvt*bottomTabbar: true
mrxvt*windowsSwitch: false
mrxvt*showMenu: true
mrxvt*hideButtons: true
mrxvt*xft: true
mrxvt*xftFont: Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
mrxvt*xftmFont: Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
mrxvt*xftAntialias: true
mrxvt*xftWeight: bold
mrxvt*xftSlant: roman
mrxvt*xftHinting: true
mrxvt*xftAutoHint: true
mrxvt*xftGlobalAdvance: true
mrxvt*xftWidth: normal
mrxvt*xftRGBA: rgb
mrxvt*xftSize: 9
mrxvt*cursorBlink: true
mrxvt*cursorBlinkInterval:500
mrxvt*geometry: 80x25
mrxvt*multichar_encoding:noenc
mrxvt*inputMethod: SCIM
mrxvt*cursorColor: white
!mrxvt*cursorColor: lightblue
mrxvt*color0: black
mrxvt*color1: #40e0d0
mrxvt*color2: #87cefa
mrxvt*color3: #ffff00
mrxvt*color4: #d1eeee
mrxvt*color5: #eed8ae
mrxvt*color6: #b4eeb4
mrxvt*color7: gray
mrxvt*color8: gray40
mrxvt*color9: #ee6363
mrxvt*color10: #c5f779
mrxvt*color11: #fff796
mrxvt*color12: #00b2ee
mrxvt*color13: #cf9ebe
mrxvt*color14: #71bebe
mrxvt*color15: white

Simple and straight forward, eh?