fixing XTerm colors

Michael Wardle michael@endbracket.net
Thu Mar 24 04:44:00 GMT 2005


Hi

It seems that "startx" starts an XTerm with a yellow foreground and a 
black background, but subsequent invocations of XTerm will use the 
user's settings.

To me this presents two problems:
- subsequent XTerms look different from the initial one
- user's settings are disrespected by the initial one

The way I think this problem can be solved is:
1. specify the default Cygwin colors etc in the X resources file
    /etc/X11/xinit/.Xresources
2. remove the customizations from
    /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

To resources corresponding to the command line parameters seen in 
xinitrc are:
xterm*saveLines: 1000
xterm*rightScrollBar: true
xterm*pointerColor: red
xterm*foreground: yellow
xterm*background: black

You would just add these lines to /etc/X11/xinit/.Xresources and invoke 
xterm as:
exec xterm

or (if the bash -l is absolutely necessary):
exec xterm -e /bin/bash -l

instead of:
exec xterm -sl 1000 -sb -rightbar -ms red -fg yellow -bg black -e 
/usr/bin/bash -l

There is a more comprehensive list of options and their corresponding 
resources in the xterm(1) manual page.

The user can then set his/her own preferences in ~/.Xresources (as I 
intend to, as I am quite happy with black on white).

I hope a future release of Cygwin/X will include these changes.

Thanks



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