KDE 4.2.1 (Fedora 10):

How to force a given force size for the **inside** of xterm and xemacs windows (say the font size for Shell commands or text in xemacs)?

System->Preferences->Look and Feel->Appearance

changes fonts on the title bar of such xterm and emacs windows, but has not effect on their insides.

Thanks.

xterm is extremely limited in what kind of fonts and font sizes it can use. I highly recommend you use something like urxvt or rxvt-unicode instead where you can. If you do you can just add something along the line of this to your ~/.Xdefaults file:

URxvt*font: xft:Monospace:pixelsize=12

If you must stick with xterm then you will need to play around with `xfontsel`.

Thanks.

I'll look into those apps, haven't in some years, and this is why:

Stuff as you mention works for me for both xterm and xemacs in .Xdefaults on another computer, running Linux Red Hat 9, and worked 15 years ago on a Sun (I still have some config files).

Thus, the question is: why doestn't it work in Fedora 10?

What has changed in Linux/KDE?

OK, urxvt works with the font description you indicated for .Xdefaults. I'll give up on xterm, but what to do about xemacs, I really want to continue using it, and it doesn't seem to be receptive to it, except for the window title.

I know that in xemacs 21.5 I should be able to select fonts from inside it, but the Option menu crashes xemacs when selected (Fedora 10 binary).

Thanks.

Seems to be a Fedora problem, the XEmacs option menu and changing fonts through it work fine for me. Maybe ask on the Fedora forums? Also try adding this to ~/.Xdefaults as well:

*Emacs.font: -*-Dejavu Sans Mono-medium-r-*-*-*-110-*-*-*-*-*-*

If all else fails there's always GVim. =)