Xterm, Schmexterm

[John Lowell <johnlowell@ameritech.net>]

OK, besides the challenge of learning the Debian way of handling fonts, 
I've run into something about the way xterm operates in Debian that is 
rather puzzling. I've got a very simple setup here, the base packages, 
the x window system, fluxbox, a system monitor, lynx which I use 
primarily for downloading purposes, and firefox. I've edited ~/.bashrc 
to provide colorizing and a prompt with which I'm comfortable. After 
copying the appropriate system file over to ~/.fluxbox/menu and editing 
~/.fluxbox/init as suggested, I edited the xterm line of ~/.fluxbox/menu 
to show

[exec]  (xterm)  {xterm -fn 8x13}

so that I wouldn't have to squint. However, if I enter a particularly 
long command, the program doesn't do the wrap-around properly. As it 
enters the new line it shows the prompt again - which it shouldn't, of 
course - and it erases it as the command continues on to completion. 
I've never seen xterm behave in this way on any of the many distros with 
which I've experimented over the last several years. I've tried 
including the commandline -aw option without an effect, at least at the 
level of the second line. I'm baffled. What's going on here, can anyone 
help?

jlowell