What is Xterm in Linux?

While many people only use xterm as a basic terminal, it is actually an incredibly powerful and configurable program. It can be customised to suit the user’s needs in ways that are impossible with other terminals such as konsole. In this article, we will take a look at some of the different options that are available to you and how they can be used.

xterm has a large number of configuration options, which can be accessed via the main menu (‘Options’) or by the keyboard keys , , and. Most of these are either toggles, which change a setting, or commands, which perform a specific function. In addition, xterm can also be configured using the terminfo facility smm (set meta mode) and rmm (reset meta mode).

This resource allows you to specify the baud rate at which you want xterm to transmit text data. Normally xterm uses the system baud rate (often 80 or 132 kbit/s), but this can be changed to your preference by setting this option.

When this option is set, xterm will not display the ””””””””””””””’”””””’ VT102 DECCOLM escape sequence when changing the number of columns. This can be handy if you are connecting to a telnet server that does not support this feature, or if you need to disable it for security reasons.

If you enable this option, xterm will display a hollow text cursor instead of the normal solid one. This is useful if you want to see where you are typing, as the hollow cursor is more easily distinguishable from ordinary characters. This option is disabled by default.

Normally, when you move the pointer or press a key, xterm sends a packet of information to the X server. The X server then interprets this information and sends a series of events to the application that generated it. If you disable this option, xterm will not send any input events.

This option enables you to trim trailing spaces from the text that is selected by pointer button two (usually the middle). This does not affect logical words and lines that wrap, nor will it strip trailing newlines from a selection copied from the screen.

When this is enabled, xterm will ignore the value of the ”””””””””””””STRING”””””’ selections. This is a workaround for some broken X clients that don’t understand 8-bit input.

This option specifies a shell program to run when xterm is started, if the SHELL environment variable is not set. Normally, xterm will check the user’s PATH environment variable for a program to run; if it cannot find one, it will use the Bourne Shell, /bin/sh.