Even among ordinary desktop users of FreeBSD, there are those who almost never start the X server. However, most of us simply access that part of the system through "terminal emulators," also called "terminal windows." In KDE, the typical terminal emulator is Konsole, though it is not quite the same as a console. We call them "emulators" because there is a great deal of similarity between a console and a terminal emulator, but the latter are still controlled by the X server, and the two exhibit different behaviors in general. At this point, those differences are not really important. Rather, it is the differences between the various terminal emulators that matter to us.
There are two areas of configuration for the terminal emulators that contribute to ease of use: keystrokes and color text.
We have mentioned previously Anne Barreta's guide to
sane keyboard settings. Just getting your DEL and
BKSP keys to work as you expect is no simple task. What we
have today is the result of a system established long ago by folks who
had different hardware than is commonly available today. There were
dozens of keyboards and dozens of terminal types, each with their own
peculiar behaviors, and few bearing much resemblance to what the average
home computer has. Most computer users today have been conditioned by
one computer culture, and the folks who write Open Source were affected
by another. The latter tend to preserve the defaults to what they were
for that institutional equipment. That doesn't mean we ordinary desktop
users can't have it our way, but that we have to do a little work to get
it.
I could not add anything to Anne's work. What I will do here is
extract the most common issues for desktop users. It's been my
experience that for Konsole, if you choose the keyboard setting for
XTerm 4, you will usually get what you expect. On the menu at the top of
the Konsole window, select "Settings" and, then
"Keyboard" then "XTerm (XFree 4.x.x)" and you should
get on the commandline a BKSP key that rubs out the
previous character going backwards, and DEL will remove
whatever is under the cursor. However, with an XTerm, that's not so
simple.
There are a handful of configuration files in your home directory
that we call "dot files" because they are named with a dot or
period at the front, which keeps them normally "hidden" out of
sight. In the one named .Xdefaults, you need to put these
lines:
xterm*VT100.Translations: #override
BackSpace: string(0x08)
Delete: string("33[3~")
Home: string("33[H")
End: string("33[F")
*ttyModes: erase ^?
This will tell XTerm what you want those keys to do, along with the
END and HOME keys. Now when you are typing on the command line, you can
use those keys as you might expect: HOME takes the cursor
back to beginning of the line, and END takes it out to the
end. Then, we need to add a few lines to a file named
.inputrc:
#For XTerm "e[1~": beginning-of-line "e[4~": end-of-line #for rxvt and Konsole "e[7~":beginning-of-line "e[8~":end-of-liner
Now, when you open XTerm or Konsole on your desktop, all the keys will tend to work as you expect. In some console applications they will also work that way. Anne explains how to work with different ones in her tutorial.
What we are doing is telling the system to translate the signals from
the keyboard into certain actions. The whole thing is really quite
complicated, and for the most part, over my head. The strange characters
between the quotation marks in these files are a representation of the
signals coming from the keyboard under differing circumstances. If you
want to see what any keystrokes do under the various terminals, first
type ^V on the command line, then the keystrokes you are
testing. It works for any combination that you can press at one time.
This can help you decide what to put in various configuration files.
But why go to all this trouble for XTerm when Konsole is already
setup? In part, it's that issue of resources again. To use Konsole takes
more power than a simple XTerm, especially if you are not using KDE. To
use Konsole outside KDE requires that a part of KDE be fired up. Also,
there are some things in Konsole that cannot be adjusted as they can be
for XTerm. For example, you may recall I stated that I have tweaked my
.joerc so that I can use comfortable keystrokes to get what
I want while editing. For example, if I run Joe in XTerm, I can hit
CTRL+HOME and move the cursor to the top of the file. That
won't work in Konsole.
less command to display more than the
most basic ASCII character set, add this line to your
.bashrc file:
export LESSCHARSET=iso8859
Of course, if you prefer some other language, simply take at look at
the manual page ("manpage") for the less command
by typing on the command line of your terminal window:
man less
and somewhere in the options you will see a list of for that. With
other terminal applications, you'll need to create a file in your home
directory named .login_conf (don't forget the leading
period) if it's not already there and add a couple of lines like
this:
me: :charset=iso-8859-15: :lang=en_US.ISO8859-15:
If your preference is not English with an extended character that
includes most European language characters, then you need to check the
directory at /usr/share/locale/ and you'll find a list of
language groups that can be used for the :lang= line; the
options for :charset= are available in the
fonts.dir file in your system display font sets:
cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/ less fonts.dir
If you don't see anything you recognize, just match it with the suffix of your language choice, but change the format to lower case and put in the appropriate hyphens. This article is not the place to explore all the various national character sets.
It was learned long ago that file operations were simpler if the
listing of files and folders was color-coded. We learned the
ls command to get a list of the files an any directory in
the console. If you type that command, it will show the directory where
you are working at the time. You can tell it to list any directory you
name. For example, if you type
ls /etc
it will show the files and folders in the /etc folder.
How can you tell which is a folder, and which is a file? Try adding the
-G option to ls and it should give you names
in color: files the same as the plain text, and folders in blue. If you
like this option as the standard, you can give the ls
command an "alias" that makes it work that way all the time.
In your .bashrc, add this line at the bottom of the
file:
alias ls="ls -G"
This means that the ls command will always assume you
want the -G option inclueded.
By default, Konsole generally allows color text display when it is called for by the choice of commands. Those colors are somewhat muted compared to other terminal emulators. Most of the colors reflect old standards long established. This was done on consoles that were black in the background, and the default text was a bright gray, not quite white. If you use a color scheme that is different from that, text colors may not work just right. When you first open a Konsole, it's usually white in background, and the text is black. I personally find this annoying and change it. Simply open the "Settings" in the Konsole menu, then "Schema" followed by "Linux colors" to get that older style.
For XTerm, you can learn something about it by typing the simple
command env and seeing a list of "environment
settings." One of them should included mention of
TERMCAP followed by a description of the Color XTerm
(xterm-color). This shows that your standard XTerm window
is set up to display color text. Again, getting your XTerm to show that
color-on-black schema requires putting some lines in your
.Xdefaults file:
xterm*background: black xterm*foreground: gray xterm*cursorColor: SkyBlue xterm*font: 9x15 xterm*ScrollBar: on xterm*SaveLines: 3500
All of these settings are explained in detail if you can wade through
the XTerm man page (man xterm). Each of these is human
readable up to a point. I happen to favor a pale blue cursor block. The
font is a standard terminal font and the size is appropriate for all but the
smallest monitors. The SaveLines setting allows you to
scroll back up a ways to see what was printed on the screen for 3500
lines. All of these can be adjusted to suit your tastes. The quickest
way to learn color names for your system is to install
"xcolorsel" (/usr/ports/x11/xcolorsel). This application will
display blocks of color with their system names. In KDE, the KColorSel
application (under "Graphics" in the menu) will allow you to
choose colors by their numerical code; simply copy the code in the small
window marked "HTML" along with the hash-mark (#). XTerm will
read that format as well for color settings.
You can also install the RxVt terminal (/usr/ports/x11/rxvt), which
is a little lighter on resources than either XTerm or Konsole. It does
things a little differently, such as displaying color in the man pages
instead of bold and underlined text. You can study how to customize that
with its own man page (man rxvt).
One final note on terminal emulators. Because we are using the Bash
Shell, we have some interesting options for customizing what shows up as
our prompt on the command line. I've seen some that were downright
extravagant. I prefer a small amount of color coded information. If you
put this line in your .bashrc:
export PS1="[33[0;36m]u@h[33[0m]w[33[1;33m]>[33[0m]"
your prompt will display the user name, the "at" symbol (@) and the name of your computer, all in cyan. The directory where you are will be displayed in the default text color, and the whole thing ends in a yellow arrow-head marker, or greater-than sign. To learn how to create your own custom Bash prompt, simply look up the Bash-Prompt-HOWTO on the Internet. You can find it wherever Linux documents are hosted. These include:
Ed Hurst is Associate Editor of Open for Business. Ed is also the Music Director for Grace Baptist Church of Kickapoo Creek, Texas. He loves computers, runs FreeBSD and GNU/Linux and reads all sorts of things. You can reach Ed at ehurst@ofb.biz.