Re: xterm fonts
On Fri, May 18, 2007 at 11:07:22AM EDT, s. keeling wrote:
> cga2000 <cga2000@optonline.net>:
> > On Thu, May 17, 2007 at 09:06:41PM EDT, s. keeling wrote:
> > >
> > > BTW, on many systems these days, .Xdefaults is deprecated and
> > > .Xresources is used instead. ymmv.
> >
> > Interesting. .Xdefaults still works on debian etch. Did you "deprecate"
> > it in what is it .. lenny? Is this documented anywhere?
>
> This happened years ago, and I believe you can blame upstream for it,
> not FOSS. Nowadays, ~/.Xdefaults is often a symbolic link that points
> to ~/.Xresources.
Ah .. well .. for one thing .. calling the blessed thing .Xresources
makes a bit more sense than .Xdefaults .. But aren't they worried this
might break things for some people? Or has this mysterious, to me at
least, entity called "upstream" automated the conversion via some trick
or other such as an .Xdefaults -> .Xresources soft link for instance?
I was under the impression that the .Xresources file was the one used
with login managers such as xdm & Co. .. but that's only a very vague
memory of something I must have read in the past.
In any case, I'm sure you know as well as I do that you can call the
file whatever you like .. except it won't be read automatically when X
starts up.
> > > RXVTNEWSFONT='-*-*-medium-r-*-*-*-100-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
> > > alias news='rxvt +sb -fn "$RXVTNEWSFONT" -geometry 136x56+37+21 -e ...
> >
> > Why keep things clean and simple and use an X resources file when it's
> > a lot more fun making them messy & complicated, heh? I was talking of
>
> It is clean and simple, and I do use ~/.Xresources where I have a
> standard font defined that I want to use in terminals. slrn is an
> exception to the rule.
I was really referring to some of the rather evil things I personally
did via aliases .. functions .. wrapper scripts that invoked other
wrapper scripts .. all this quick'n dirty stuff eventually got out of
hand .. no standards .. no naming conventions .. no strategy .. etc.
And so I ended up with a bloody mess that took me some time to clean up
while still having the apps behave as they did before.
Since the OP sounded like he'd never heard of X resources .. I thought
I'd give him a hint.
Nonetheless and although you can probably come up with a clean strategy
via shell functions .. variables .. aliases .. etc. as long as you take
the time to design it and build it from the ground up, I still don't see
the point in adding all these snippets of code and going through all the
contortions .. when X already provides its own native solution via
resource file(s). Unless you are totally allergic to the syntax, of
course .. that, I could understand.
Another thing that I don't like in principle with a solution that's
app-centric as opposed to defining everything globally to the X server
is that this code you add gets executed ... variables created etc. ..
each and every time you start an instance of one of your apps. True ..
when you see the bloat in the average linux user's X environment .. it's
peanuts .. but all the same it still feels like a way of doing things
that goes against the grain .. X's I mean.
Thanks for your comments.
cga
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