NAME¶
xtermcontrol - dynamic control of XFree86 xterm properties.
SYNOPSIS¶
xtermcontrol [OPTIONS]
...
DESCRIPTION¶
xtermcontrol makes it easy to change colors, title, font and geometry of
a running XFree86
xterm(1), as well as to report the current settings
of the aforementioned properties.
Window manipulations de-/iconify, raise/lower, maximize/restore and reset are
also supported.
To complete the feature set; xtermcontrol lets advanced users issue any xterm
control sequence of their choosing.
OPTIONS¶
- --fg=COLOR
- Set foreground color (see also COLOR NAMES).
- --bg=COLOR
- Set background color.
- --colorN=COLOR
- Set N'th [0-15] color.
- --highlight=COLOR
- Set highlight color.
- --cursor=COLOR
- Set cursor color.
- --mouse-fg=COLOR
- Set mouse pointer foreground color.
- --mouse-bg=COLOR
- Set mouse pointer background color.
- --font=FONT
- Set font name (see also FONT NAMES). Alternatively
it is possible to specify a fontmenu index as ´#[0-6]´ or
navigate the fontmenu by relative sizes as ´#+N´ or
´#-N´, where N is an optional integer.
- --title=STRING
- Set window title. Note that mechanisms like the
bash(1) PROMPT_COMMAND may overwrite the title.
- --geometry=WIDTHxHEIGHT+XOFF+YOFF
- Set size and/or position. Through its control sequences the
xterm only recognize positive XOFF and YOFF offsets, which
are pixels relative to the upper left hand corner of the display.
xtermcontrol is therefore unable to handle negative offsets as described
in the X(7x) GEOMETRY SPECIFICATIONS and therefore truncates
negative values to zero.
- --get-fg
- Report foreground color.
- --get-bg
- Report background color.
- --get-colorN
- Report N'th [0-15] color.
- --get-highlight
- Report highlight color.
- --get-cursor
- Report cursor color.
- --get-mouse-fg
- Report mouse pointer foreground color.
- --get-mouse-bg
- Report mouse pointer background color.
- --get-font
- Report font.
- --get-title
- Report window title.
- --get-geometry
- Report size and position. The size of the text area is
reported in characters and the position is reported in pixels relative to
the upper left hand corner of the display.
- --maximize
- Maximize window.
- --restore
- Restore maximized window.
- --iconify
- Iconify window.
- --de-iconify
- De-iconify window.
- --raise
- Raise window.
- --lower
- Lower window.
- --reset
- Full reset.
- --raw=CTLSEQS
- Issue raw control sequence (see also XTERM CONTROL
SEQUENCES).
- --file=FILE
- Force xtermcontrol to read configurations (see also
CONFIGURATION) from FILE instead of the standard personal
initialization file ~/.xtermcontrol.
- --force, -f
- Skip TERM environment variable check.
- --verbose, -v
- Print verbose reports.
- --help, -h
- Print help message and exit.
- --version
- Print the version number and exit.
CONFIGURATION¶
xtermcontrol reads a default, ~/.xtermcontrol, or a user specified configuration
file on startup. Each line in the file is either a comment or contains an
attribute. Attributes consist of a keyword and an associated value:
keyword = value # comment
The valid keyword/value combinations are:
foreground="COLOR"
background="COLOR"
highlight="COLOR"
cursor="COLOR"
mouse-foreground="COLOR"
mouse-background="COLOR"
geometry="WIDTHxHEIGHT+XOFF+YOFF"
font="FONT"
color0="COLOR"
color1="COLOR"
color2="COLOR"
color3="COLOR"
color4="COLOR"
color5="COLOR"
color6="COLOR"
color7="COLOR"
color8="COLOR"
color9="COLOR"
color10="COLOR"
color11="COLOR"
color12="COLOR"
color13="COLOR"
color14="COLOR"
color15="COLOR"
Whitespace is ignored in attributes unless within a quoted value. The character
´#´ is taken to begin a comment. Each ´#´ and all
remaining characters on that line is ignored.
FONT NAMES¶
xtermcontrol accepts any
X(7x) FONT NAMES. Font names like
´-adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-m-60-iso8859-1´ are
very cumbersome to write, so it is convenient to make use of aliases, e.g.
´fixed´ or ´8x13´, if present in fonts.alias files of the
font directories.
COLOR NAMES¶
xtermcontrol accepts any
X(7x) COLOR NAMES. Basically this means that
colors are specified by name or rgb value, e.g. ´blue´,
´rgb:0000/0000/FFFF´ or ´#00F´. Colors are typically
reported by the xterm in a device-dependent numerical form, e.g.
´rgb:0000/0000/FFFF´. Note that old syntax rgb values should always
be quoted to avoid ´#´ being interpreted as the beginning of a
comment by the shell (see also
FILES).
XTERM CONTROL SEQUENCES¶
The secret behind xtermcontrol is xterm control sequences. All the possible
(there are a plethora of them) control sequences are documented in
ctlseqs.txt, found in the
xterm(1) distribution (see also
FILES).
TROUBLESHOOTING¶
If read/write permissions on the tty's are changed so that special group
membership is required to be able to write to the pseudo terminal, the easiest
workaround is to install xtermcontrol setuid root.
Xterm(1) has three resources, allowWindowOps, allowTitleOps, and
allowFontOps, that enables or disables special operations which xtermcontrol
relies on. If any of these resources are set (or defaults) to 'false'
xtermcontrol may hang. The resources corresponds to xtermcontrol options as:
allowWindowOps:
--raise
--lower
--restore
--maximize
--iconify
--de-iconify
--get-title
--geometry
--get-geometry
allowTitleOps:
--title
allowFontOps:
--font
--get-font
All three resources can usually be enabled for the current xterm session via a
menu; ctrl+rightclick and look for menu item names like 'Allow Window Ops'. To
set these resource values persistently you can add the following to either
your local ~/.Xdefaults file, or to a system-wide resource file like
/etc/X11/app-defaults/XTerm:
*VT100.allowWindowOps: true
*VT100.allowTitleOps: true
*VT100.allowFontOps: true
FILES¶
- <XRoot>/X11/rgb.txt
- Default rgb color name file location.
- ctlseqs.txt
- Xterm control sequences documentation. Distributed with
xterm from http://dickey.his.com/xterm/
SEE ALSO¶
xterm(1), X(7x)
COPYRIGHT¶
Copyright © 2002-2009 Jess Thrysoee <jess@thrysoee.dk>