Anti-aliasing and TrueType fonts with XTerm

I’m one of those folks that don’t use heavy bloated window managers like GNOME or KDE. I prefer a light-weight, fast and slick window manager which is why I run Enlightenment DR17 (or E17 for short).

For a terminal application I used to run XTerm, but now I use mrxvt which is another light-weight terminal emulator for X that has a tabbed interface and runs on a wide variant of Unix like operating systems.

Many of my friends use GNOME Terminal or Konsole just because it can use beautiful fonts like “BitStream Vera Sans Mono”.

If you are running XTerm or Rxvt don’t lose heart, XTerm can use these beautiful fonts.

What are the pre-requisites?

Your system needs to have the XRender extension enabled in your X.org. You can verify this by running: 

shell>/usr/X11R6/bin/xdpyinfo | grep RENDER
RENDER

You would also need Xft and the fontconfig libraries installed in your system.

How to make XTerm or mrxvt use the TrueType fonts?

If your system does not have some nice and popular TrueType fonts on your Unix-like operating system, you can download them from here.

Once you have the fonts, to use for example, “Andale Mono” with XTerm, you can run: 

shell> xterm -fa 'Andale Mono'

or with mrxvt,

shell> mrxvt -xftfm 'Andale Mono' -xft

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 10:56pm and is filed under Enlightenment, GNU/Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own web site.

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