For a complete list of the features available with xwsh(1), see the xwsh reference page. The most commonly used features are described here in the following examples.
To create a simple shell window with a dark gray background and yellow text, issue the following command:
The above command generates a new window and a new shell using the colors specified. The window will use the default font selection and window size, since these attributes were not specified. The command that created the shell was placed in the background, so the shell does not tie up the window where you gave the command. You can always place a command in the background by adding the ampersand character (&) to the end of the command line. For more information on placing processes in the background, see the csh(1) reference page.xwsh -fg yellow -bg gray40 &
There are 100 shades of gray available. Gray0 is the darkest, and is virtually black. Gray100 is the lightest and is virtually white. The effect of selecting foreground (text) in yellow and background in gray40 is similar to yellow chalk on a gray chalkboard. For a complete list of the available colors in your palette, use the colorview(1) command. This brings up a window with the list of colors in a scrollable list, and a display window to show a patch of the currently selected color.
In the next example, we change the colors to black on a sky blue background (high contrast between the foreground and background makes reading the screen easier), and we add a specification for the size of the window.
The first number in the geometry option is 80, indicating that the new shell window should be 80 characters wide (this is the default). The second number indicates the desired number of lines on the screen, in this case 40. Once again, the xwsh command has been placed in the background by adding the ampersand character to the end of the command line.xwsh -fg black -bg skyblue -geometry 80x40 &
You can make your new shell come up on your desktop as an icon by adding the -iconic flag to any xwsh command.
To select a font other than the default, you can use the on-screen font selection utility, or you can specify the font on the command line. It is a great deal easier to use the on-screen font selection utility, as you must specify a great number of attributes for the font on the command line. Also, it frequently takes a great number of selections before you settle on a font, a weight (regular or bold, condensed or normal) and a font size that appeals to you. Using the on-screen font utility, you can preview what each selection will look like on your windows.
Once you have made your selections, you can copy and paste the font selection information and the rest of your xwsh command into a shell script file for convenient future use. For example, here is an xwsh command line that specifies the IRIS-specific font haebfix in a medium weight with normal spacing, 15 pixels tall. The remaining information is generated by the font selection utility for the shell.
Note that in your shell script, the above command appears all on one line. Due to formatting constraints, the command is broken across two lines in this example.xwsh -iconic -fg yellow -bg grey40 -geometry 80x40 -fn \ -sgi-haebfix-medium-r-normal--15-150-72-72-m-90-iso8859-1 &
For complete information on using the font selection utility in xwsh and the xfontsel(1) command, see Chapter 2 of the IRIS Utilities Guide.