OT: xterm setup

[Hendrik Hasenbein]

Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
>>>I recently upgraded my desktop to Gnome2, and of the various things
>>>that are causing me grief, the biggest is what's happened to my xterm
>>>windows. Now, after the change, it does three things differently and
>>>annoyingly: (1) it defaults to black/colored text on a white
>>>background; (2) it doesn't have a scrollbar of any sort; and (3)
>>>there's no menubar with basic "File"/"Edit" etc. options.

Sounds like the gnome terminal or eterm. The standard xterm doesn't give 
you a menubar.

>>>I can somewhat get around (1) by launching it with "xterm -r",
>>>although while this does display white/colored on black, it also
>>>makes other menus (e.g. those launched with ctrl-[mouse buttons])
>>>look incomplete.

You can set up .Xresources to change the behaviour of all xterms:
XTerm*reverseVideo:     true
XTerm*ScrollBar:        off
XTerm*SaveLines:        300

>>>But (2) is the worst; I really need to have
>>>scrollbars with this. I see that there's a toggleable option to
>>>"Enable Scrollbar" that I get to with ctrl-Mouse2, but this isn't a
>>>regular scrollbar that I can click up and down on, with a moveable
>>>thumb, etc., as I used to have before the upgrade and as the
>>>gnome-terminal has now.
Also:
XTerm*ScrollBar:        off
XTerm*SaveLines:        300

and 'xterm -sb'

> Hmm. I certainly thought I was using xterm, as I recall setting
> up the icon to launch xterm, and my .bashrc is setting TERM
> to xterm-color rather than gnome-terminal or anything else.

TERM states the capabilities of the terminal. Since most terminals 
implements the same feature set for input as xterm does, they use the 
same entry in termcap.

> Is it possible that the functional scrollbars, etc., were an addition 
> of the window manager, and if so is there any way to replicate it now?

Use eterm or any other clone.

Hendrik