xfontsel
More info
- Creator
- Ralph R. Swick
- Released
- Type
- X client
- License
- MIT
- Source
- gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/app/xfontsel
A clickable form over the fourteen fields of an XLFD name, for finding a font among the X server's core fonts without typing asterisks by hand.
An XLFD name looks like -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-1, and few people remember what position nine means. Ralph Swick of DEC and Project Athena wrote xfontsel for X11R4 in 1989 as the remedy: each field is a button that drops down a menu of the values the server actually has, and a choice in one field narrows what can be chosen in the others. A sample text area shows the result. -pattern restricts the selection from the start, and -print writes the chosen name to standard output on exit.
The select button puts the name in PRIMARY, so it can be pasted into an Xresources file or an xterm flag. The program only sees server-side fonts, the ones delivered by xfs and fonts.dir; when Xft and Fontconfig moved fonts to the client side around 2002, fc-list became its successor and xfontsel a museum of what is left.