The answer by Gilles was the hint I needed here:
"Leaving the default value of xterm and setting the termName resource to
xterm-256color (which causes the environment variable TERM to be set to
the same value) are thus both sensible choices. Setting TERM to arbitrary
values wouldn't work, but both xterm and xterm-256color make sense."
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/108410/is-it-correct-to-set-the-term-variable-manually
...seems like a more lightweight way of providing various settings to
Gtk apps (and maybe other stuff? I'm not sure).
Various other font tweaks and such in this commit.
- messes with DPI & fonts
- changes trayer height
- rewrites chunks of xmonad.hs to use EZConfig style bindings, rofi for
launcher and i3lock for a lock screen (thanks @benlemasurier), and a
slightly different set of layouts. also handles some fancy laptop keys
like volume adjustment. still need to steal casey & tyler's stuffs for
backlight handling, probably.
for now, i'm going to keep these changes in a separate branch rather than
attempt to make them work on all of my systems. I'm running Debian Stretch
on here and the monitor is giant, so it would likely be a hassle, and it's
small enough that i can probably just manage as a separate branch as long
as needed.
I don't know if I'll stick with vim-airline for my statusbar, but it has
some appealing features.
Dropped terminal fonts down a bit in size. Seems better to have a
little more context for editing on this display. At this res, with
those fonts, I get a 147x40 terminal. It's reasonably legible.
(I'm currently on a System76 Galago UltraPro or whatever it's called,
purchased in August of 2014 or thereabouts.)
Brennen Bearnes