Update from my personal hell

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Jerry Feldman writes:
| Derek Martin <invalid at pizzashack.org> wrote:
| > You could use xterm instead.  It's better than either konsole or
| > gnome-term in almost every conceivable way, IMNSHO.  A perfect case of
| > "why try to fix what isn't broken" if you ask me.
| I also prefer Xterm. The only thing I like about Konsole is that you can
| easily change the colors of an existing term.

Yeah; it's funny that xterm has never had a menu to do this. It would
be  useful.   I  wonder  why  this  was left out, considering xterm's
near-infinite set of options and config settings?

OTOH, I've had a cute little xterm startup script that I call 'xrand'
that I've used for years:

: cat ~/sh/xrand
#!/bin/sh
# Exec an xterm with random colors. There should be a $HOME/.colors
# file full of xterm command-line color options.  A blank line will
# get the default colors.
#
S='-g 90x36'
O='-cm -bdc -ulc -dc +pc -sb'
if [ ! -f $HOME/.colors ];then
    echo "Can't find $HOME/.colors file."
    c=`-bg black -fg yellow`
else
    m=`date +%H%M%S`
    n=`wc -l<$HOME/.colors`
    l=`expr \( $m '+' $$ \) % $n + 1`
    c=`head <$HOME/.colors -$l |tail -1`
fi
xterm -name xrand $S $O $c $* &
exit 0

The $HOME/.colors file contains lines like:
  -fg yellow -bg black      -cm -cr red
  -fg green  -bg navy       -cm -cr red
  -fg cyan   -bg DarkGreen  -cm -cr red
  -fg pink   -bg grey30     -cm -cr white

and so on, whatever produces good contrasts on the machine's display.

One obvious question is:  Shouldn't this be written in  perl?   Well,
yes,  it  should be.  I did it as a sh script mostly as a fun demo of
ultra-geek shell wizardry. ("You did the arithmetic in a shell script
just to pick a random line?  Are you insane?" ;-)

It certainly isn't efficient. But how often do you start a new xterm?



--
   O
 <:#/> John Chambers
   +   <jc at trillian.mit.edu>
  / \  <jmchambers at rcn.com>