pterm - yet another X terminal emulator

pterm [ options ]

pterm is a terminal emulator for X. It is based on a port of the terminal emulation engine in the Windows SSH client PuTTY.

The command-line options supported by pterm are:

-e command [ arguments ]

Specify a command to be executed in the new terminal. Everything on the command line after this option will be passed straight to the execvp system call; so if you need the command to redirect its input or output, you will have to use sh:

pterm -e sh -c 'mycommand < inputfile'

--display display-name

Specify the X display on which to open pterm. (Note this option has a double minus sign, even though none of the others do. This is because this option is supplied automatically by GTK. Sorry.)

-name font-name

Specify the name under which pterm looks up X resources. Normally it will look them up as (for example) pterm.Font. If you specify `-name xyz', it will look them up as xyz.Font instead. This allows you to set up several different sets of defaults and choose between them.

-fn font-name

Specify the font to use for normal text displayed in the terminal.

-fb font-name

Specify the font to use for bold text displayed in the terminal. If the BoldAsColour resource is set to 1 (the default), bold text will be displayed in different colours instead of a different font, so this option will be ignored. If BoldAsColour is set to 0 and you do not specify a bold font, pterm will overprint the normal font to make it look bolder.

-fw font-name

Specify the font to use for double-width characters (typically Chinese, Japanese and Korean text) displayed in the terminal.

-fwb font-name

Specify the font to use for bold double-width characters (typically Chinese, Japanese and Korean text). Like -fb, this will be ignored unless the BoldAsColour resource is set to 0.

-geometry geometry

Specify the size of the terminal, in rows and columns of text. See for more information on the syntax of geometry specifications.

-sl lines

Specify the number of lines of scrollback to save off the top of the terminal.

-fg colour

Specify the foreground colour to use for normal text.

-bg colour

Specify the background colour to use for normal text.

-bfg colour

Specify the foreground colour to use for bold text, if the BoldAsColour resource is set to 1 (the default).

-bbg colour

Specify the foreground colour to use for bold reverse-video text, if the BoldAsColour resource is set to 1 (the default). (This colour is best thought of as the bold version of the background colour; so it only appears when text is displayed in the background colour.)

-cfg colour

Specify the foreground colour to use for text covered by the cursor.

-cbg colour

Specify the background colour to use for text covered by the cursor. In other words, this is the main colour of the cursor.

-title title

-title title

Specify the initial title of the terminal window. (This can be

Specify the initial title of the terminal window. (This can be changed under control of the server.)

-ut- or +ut

Tells pterm not to record your login in the utmp, wtmp and lastlog system log files; so you will not show up on finger or who listings, for example.

-ut

Tells pterm to record your login in utmp, wtmp and lastlog: this is the opposite of -ut-. This is the default option: you will probably only need to specify it explicitly if you have changed the default using the StampUtmp resource.

-ls- or +ls

Tells pterm not to execute your shell as a login shell.

-ls

Tells pterm to execute your shell as a login shell: this is the opposite of -ls-. This is the default option: you will probably only need to specify it explicitly if you have changed the default using the LoginShell resource.

-sb- or +sb

Tells pterm not to display a scroll bar.

-sb

Tells pterm to display a scroll bar: this is the opposite of -sb-. This is the default option: you will probably only need to specify it explicitly if you have changed the default using the ScrollBar resource.

-log filename

This option makes pterm log all the terminal output to a file as well as displaying it in the terminal.

-cs charset

This option specifies the character set in which pterm should assume the session is operating. This character set will be used to interpret all the data received from the session, and all input you type or paste into pterm will be converted into this character set before being sent to the session.

Any character set name which is valid in a MIME header (and supported by pterm) should be valid here (examples are `ISO-8859-1', `windows-1252' or `UTF-8'). Also, any character encoding which is valid in an X logical font description should be valid (`ibm-cp437', for example).

pterm's default behaviour is to use the same character encoding as its primary font. If you supply a Unicode (iso10646-1) font, it will default to the UTF-8 character set.

Character set names are case-insensitive.

-nethack

Tells pterm to enable NetHack keypad mode, in which the numeric keypad generates the NetHack hjklyubn direction keys. This enables you to play NetHack with the numeric keypad without having to use the NetHack number_pad option (which requires you to press `n' before any repeat count). So you can move with the numeric keypad, and enter repeat counts with the normal number keys.

-xrm resource-string

This option specifies an X resource string. Useful for setting resources which do not have their own command-line options. For example:

pterm -xrm 'ScrollbarOnLeft: 1'

-help, --help

Display a message summarizing the available options.

-pgpfp

Display the fingerprints of the PuTTY PGP Master Keys, to aid in verifying new files released by the PuTTY team.