xterm displaying two chars for one, 2nd looks to be a space

[Bob Willcox]

Hi Thomas,

Well, in migrating my currtent office machine to this new one I copied my
entire home directory data to the new one. Once I'd done that xterm starting
working ok (no more extra spaces after typed in chars). My best guess at this
point is that the Xterm.resources file that was on my office machinge that is
now copied to the new one has some setting(s) in it that solved the issue. The
modification date on the file is 8 years ago so apparently I've ignored it for
quite awhile (and don't remember where I may have gotten it from or what I may
have changed in it).

Anyway, thanks for your help on this. Think I'm going to leave well-enough
alone now. :)

Bob


On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 04:43:56AM -0400, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 03:24:33PM -0500, Bob Willcox wrote:
> > On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 10:22:59AM -0400, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> > > On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 09:03:37AM -0500, Bob Willcox wrote:
> > > > Hi All,
> > > > 
> > > > I just did an new install of the latest Freebsd 12.0-CURRENT:
> > > > 
> > > > FreeBSD anakin.immure.com 12.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT #1 r331115: Sun Mar 18 06:58:19 CDT 2018     bob at anakin.immure.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/amd64.amd64/sys/ANIKIN  amd64
> > > > 
> > > > and have installed xorg-7.7_3. My window manager is ctwm-4.0.1,1 and xterm is
> > > > xterm-331.
> > > > 
> > > > Now for my problem: when I start up an xterm in X from ctwm I get two
> > > > characters for every one entered, with the second one being a space.
> > > > 
> > > > For example, when typing in hello in an xterm window it displays as
> > > > 
> > > > h e l l o
> > > 
> > > It could do that if the font-metrics say it's that wide, even if (almost)
> > > none of the glyphs actually say that.
> > 
> > Thanks for your reply Thomas, but I'm afraid I'm not following what you say
> > here. I'm not not very familiar with fonts so I'm confused by your comment "if
> > the font-metrics say it's that wide".
> > 
> > Note that I've been using the same xinitrc, Xdefaults, and ctwmrc files since
> > the mid '90s and have never had this behavior.
> 
> I was referring to the fact that besides xterm, there are other components
> which can produce the problem (the font files, the libraries reading the
> font files and the locale support).  FreeBSD's had problems with locale
> support for quite a while, plus freetype2 has made changes.  But "font
> metrics" refers to the size of the glyphs in a font-file which are stored
> in its header (and which freetype2 and/or fontconfig can (mis)interpret).
>  
> > > > However, if I specify a font with '-fn 10x20' on the xterm invocation I don't
> > > > get the gratuitous spaces.
> > > 
> > > that's consistent with my remark above.
> > > 
> > > Also, it's possible (I suppose) that the change to use Unicode 10
> > > last spring is aggravating the problem, but I'd have to study an
> > > example to see exactly why.
> > 
> > Is there some way that I could revert that change or configure xterm to
> > not use it?
> 
> I took a quick look for "downgrade freebsd package", and didn't see anything
> obvious.  For development, I've adapted the port-files from FreeBSD in xterm's
> sources, and have used those in my ports tree.  So what I'd do to get/test
> and older version of xterm would be to tweak the PORTVERSION in the Makefile
> (and checksums) using /usr/ports/x11/xterm as a starting point.
> 
> Something like
> 
> 	cd /usr/ports/x11/xterm
> 	sudo make
> 
> to get the dist-files for the current version on the disk, then copy the
> version of "xterm-XXX.tgz" from
> 	ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net/xterm/
> to
> 	cd /usr/ports/distfiles
> 
> and
> 	sudo vi Makefile
> 
> to change the PORTVERSION number, and referring to
> 
> https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/porters-handbook/porting-checksum.html
> 
> 	sudo make makesum
> 	sudo make clean
> 	sudo make
> 	sudo make install
> 
> The change to use Unicode 10 was in xterm #330, so you might consider #329.
> 
> -- 
> Thomas E. Dickey <dickey at invisible-island.net>
> https://invisible-island.net
> ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net



-- 
Bob Willcox    | The amount of flak received on any subject is inversely
bob at immure.com | proportional to the subject's true value.
Austin, TX     |