This is not an admission that's going to cost me much - I love xterms. If you peek into my desktop at any random time, you'll find a bunch of xterms all ssh-ed into different boxes. And you'd notice one thing, they are all black and with green text scrolling down it. For some Matrix fans here, that'd sound like the only way to watch compiling code scroll by. Other than the nostalgic rush of blinking green monochrome monitors, there is a more pragmatic reason behind this. I just find it easier to read green than white text - it seems to have more contrast than white on black, as strange as that might sound.
So all my xterms are green on black, but that's because the shortcut configured spawns them with xterm -fg green -bg black. But I've got a few scripts which spawn xterms in a loop and I really didn't want to pass these args there directly. Before I go deep into xterm land, let me explain why exactly you'd need that.
APACHE_CHILDREN=`ps fax | grep "\_ /usr/sbin/httpd" | cut -f 2 -d' '`
for pid in $APACHE_CHILDREN; do
xterm -e "gdb --pid=$pid -x c.gdb" &
done
That is what I use to debug multiple apache children for APC. It is a pretty straight forward script, except that I run it on different boxes. Now, I want to make the background and foreground colour configured per user+box rather than hard-code it in a script. The man page has absolutely no information on this particular subject - merely mentions that /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/XTerm-color is where the system wide configuration lives.
A further read through shows that all such X resources defined can be overriden using ~/.Xdefaults file. But that didn't work. This is exactly where users stop and developers continue probing. One of my favourite tools for finding configuration files read by an app is strace.
[gopal@phoenix ~]$ strace -e open xterm 2>&1 | grep "gopal"
open("/home/gopal/.Xauthority", O_RDONLY) = 4
open("/home/gopal/.Xdefaults-phoenix", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT
....
So in this version of xterm, the code hits the ~/.Xdefaults-hostname file to pick up the configuration values and then it all pretty much fell into place - here's what that file had to contain.
*VT100*foreground: green *VT100*background: black
Now, to go and play around with a few more interesting xterm configuration parameters - *saveLines and *VT100.utf8Fonts.font. I'm probably reinventing a lot of wheels and documentation here, but as long as it is fun ...
--He is a man capable of turning any colour into grey.
-- John LeCarre