X11 low-resolution scrollable desktop

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X11 low-resolution scrollable desktop

To set up the low resolution and the scrolling, see Magnification in X11, unless your X server is a Mac, in which case just see System Preferences / Accessibility.

Configuration files

These are usually files and directories in your home directory whose names start with a dot (.). You have to use ls -a to list them. I do not recommend replacing your existing files with these without first checking that your existing files do not contain anything important. Look at the files and see if you want to merge anything.

.Xresources - used for setting fonts and colours (etc) in various X applications; a good starting point. See the comments at the beginning of the file about setup.
.gtkrc - needed in addition to the above for some applications. You should save this file as both .gtkrc and .gtkrc-2.0 (or just save it as .gtkrc and do ln -s .gtkrc .gtkrc-2.0).
Note: Some badly-behaved programs like QQ will need this .gtkrc to be temporarily renamed before they are started.
.lyx/lyxrc and .lyx/preferences - used to configure LyX (a LaTeX front-end). Note: If using a version of LyX prior to 1.5.3, use the XForms version rather than the Qt version, due to LyX bug 4293.

Window managers:

flwm's colours can be configured at the command line from within .xsession, e.g. flwm -fg white -bg darkblue; if you have an old version that doesn't obey the -fg flag, you may be able to upgrade, or apply the patch I submitted to Debian bug #267983. On some systems you may have to fall back to TWM in which case you could try this .twmrc.

XEmacs configuration

This can accumulate lots of settings so I've split them across several files. You can download all of these files as a gzipped tar archive emacs.tgz and unpack it in your home directory (tar -zxf emacs.tgz), taking care first to save any previous configuration that you want to keep. The files will be extracted into the .xemacs directory (not normally visible).

Brief user guide: If the fonts get messy, M-x fix-fonts; if you can't zoom in, try M-x pc-default-font-bigger or M-x pc-default-font-double (if the result is too big for the screen, M-x smaller-frame, M-x even-smaller-frame or M-x very-small-frame). Look through the .el files for other user functions and things you can customise.

Other

If your system causes modern applications to render their fonts poorly at low resolution, you might also want to check my FreeType at low resolution page.

Some distributions also have a package big-cursor which provides large fonts for the mouse cursor (sometimes you can just install it, but very old versions might need a little setting up).

Don't forget to also adjust the monitor's `brightness' and `contrast' settings to comfortable levels. (I usually find a high `contrast' and a low `brightness' is better.)

If an application's bright background is hurting your eyes, and you cannot get it to change colours using the above configuration or any other method, then as a last resort you can try my VNC colour-inverting hack.