Understanding resources

Window appearance options

Most of the standard command line options determine the appearance of a client's window. They specify the background color (-bg), the foreground color (-fg), the border color (-bd) and the border width (-bw) in pixels. The colors you assign must be available from the color database.

For example, to start a scoterm client so it uses yellow characters on a navy background, you would enter the following command:

scoterm -bg navy -fg yellow &

If a color name includes embedded space, you must include the color name in quotes. For example, to specify light blue as the background for scoterm, you would enter:

scoterm -bg "light blue" &

The -rv option specifies that the client should reverse the colors that were defined for the background and foreground resources.

NOTE: Because the window manager places its frames over the window borders provided by the X server, the -bd and -bw options have no effect unless a window manager is not running.