Terminal special colors, etc

[David A. De Graaf]

I'm a dinosaur.  Mostly, I use xterm's and the command line to do
work.  I hate GUIs that conceal and obscure what's really going on.
The cups subsystem is arguably the worst software ever written.
But I digress...

A fresh installation of FC6 yielded a much finer screen resolution and
teeny tiny xterm's that were unreadable.   Instead of struggling to
find appropriate new fonts to use with the -fn option, I moved to the
promised land of 'Terminal'.  I discovered that clicking on Edit |
Preferences yields a plethora of configuration options, including all
the fonts and sizes anyone can imagine, and infinite variations of color.
All this configuration stuff is stored in ~/.config/, so changing one
Terminal changes them all, instantly.

I like to color root windows differently so, in the past, I created a
launcher with a command
    xfterm4 -fg red3 -bg honeydew2 -e /bin/su -

With Terminal there are no such options, but there is the environment
variable, XDG_CONFIG_HOME.  So I created a new directory,
~/.configroot, and the launcher command
    export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/home/dad/.configroot; Terminal -x /bin/su -

That didn't work.  Apparently, compound commands aren't acceptable.

So I put the two commands into a script, /usr/local/bin/rootwindow:
    export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/home/dad/.configroot
    Terminal -x /bin/su -

and used that in the launcher command.  That works!
When I edit these preferences, only the windows that use the ~/.configroot
files are affected.

This is very elegant.   Good work guys.

But...   There's a problem.
When I reboot, the session manager captures the command for each
window, but not the environment variable.  Thus the new session has
root windows that prompt for the root password, but the special colors
are lost.

How can the proper XDG_CONFIG_HOME value be saved for each window?

-- 
	David A. De Graaf    DATIX, Inc.    Hendersonville, NC
	dad at datix.2y.net     www.datix.us