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XTERMCONTROL(1) User Commands XTERMCONTROL(1)
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
Source a configuration FILE (see also CONFIGURATION).
--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
The default configuration file ~/.xtermcontrol is sourced if
xtermcontrol is run without options or if specifically requested, e.g.
'xtermcontrol --file=~/.xtermcontrol'.
Each line in a configuration 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).
OS X Terminal.app
The OS X Terminal.app emulates an extended set of the VTxxx series
commands, closely resembling dtterm. Therefore the following subset of
xtermcontrol options works as expected:
--title
--geometry
--get-geometry
--maximize
--restore
--iconify
--de-iconify
--raise
--lower
--reset
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 (C) 2002-2015 Jess Thrysoee <jess@thrysoee.dk>
xtermcontrol 3.3 December 13, 2015 XTERMCONTROL(1)