For a while I added the scrollbar with Thomas Dickey's xterm. I chose to do that because Thomas Dickey's xterm supports 256 colors and very portable because it uses GNU autoconf. It compiles cleanly under cygwin in MS Windows as well.

Note: I'm not interested in adding anything else motif (like toolbar, menu etc) to this xterm. But I'll keep maintaining this page. I'll update the code as Thomas Dickey releases new version of his xterm. I use it for work and fun after all.

This version is built on Thomas Dickey's xterm-177.

Requirements
You need Motif or LessTif.

Motif is freely available from OpenGroup for OpenSource OSes (well it's my interpretation). Please read about it in OpenGroup's Motif page. Now a days some Linux distribution comes with Motif pre-installed. For more motif information, visit Kenton Lee's Motif page.

The alternative to Motif is freely available LessTif.

If you're on MS Windows, do not forget to install cygwin, cgywin XFree86 and also LessTif from cygwin.

Download

Compile

 $ gunzip < xterm_177_motif.tar.gz | tar xvf -
 $ cd xterm_177_motif
 $ rm -f config.cache
 $ ./configure --with-motif=/usr/local/lesstif --enable-256-color

 or if Motif/Lesstif is in standard place

 $ ./configure --with-motif --enable-256-color

 $ make

 $ ./xterm -v
XFree86 4.3.0(177)
* Compiled with Motif scrollbar support
* Extra flags: -sb to enable scrollbar, -sbc to specify scrollbar color
* Example: xterm -sb -sbc '#97a3bc'
*          xterm -sb -sbc red
* For Motif Scrollbar support code, please visit the URL:
 http://muquit.com/muquit/software/ansi_xterm/ansi_xterm.html

Note: If compiled with Motif, the scrollbar is ON by default. You also get two extra flags, -sb and -sbc scrollbar_color.

Screen-shots

vim editing hello.c in xterm running in Linux

vim editing hello.c in xterm running natively in MS Windows 2000

X Resources file
This is my XTerm file. You can copy it to your home directory or /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults. I use white backbround and blue forground in xterm, so it reflects my choice of colors I use with vim's syntax highlighting feature.

Syntax highligting in vim
Start vim and type:

:syntax on
:hi

If you want to change certain syxtax coloring for vim, you can do this in your ~/.vimrc file. Example:

hi Comment ctermfg=12
hi perlStatement ctermfg=2
hi perlIdentifier ctermfg=10
hi htmlTagName ctermfg=12

If you look at my XTerm, color 2 refers to red, 10 refers to #008000, 12 refers to maroon. You can learn about color names in the file /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb.txt.

See Also mwinclip.pl

URL of this page: http://www.muquit.com/muquit/software/ansi_xterm/ansi_xterm.html