Eterm Oddity

While configuring my Fluxbox setup, I decided I wanted transparent terminals tailing various logs, or running top, from startup. I described getting most of this setup in a previous post. Since then, I ran into and solved two additional problems. The first is a result of specifying the positioning and size of the eterm windows via their title bar, using “Remember”, which writes to .fluxbox/apps. Doing this for a transparent window can cause a black bar to appear at the bottom of said window. This is because of the second issue I ran into. When specifying the geometry of eterm through the command line option “-g”, the format is “-g NUMOFCOLUMNSxNUMOFROWS+XOffset+YOffset “. The Offset items are in pixels, but the column and row specifications are in, of course, columns and rows, i.e. character widths and rows. So a setting of “-g 80×50+0+500″ would make a window holding 80 columns, 50 rows, and it would be placed flush with the left side of the screen, and 500 pixels from the top.

This difference in units is what causes the black bar to appear when using Remember to set eterm’s position and dimensions. This is because the Remember setting is in pixels, and a given set of pixel dimensions will not usually correspond to the exact number needed for a whole number of rows. I believe this difference causes the black bar.