As others have mentioned, the easiest way to do this is just to run
the GNOME settings daemon (or the XFCE/KDE equivalent). If you don't
want to do that for some reason, then read on...
Yuliang Wang
I prefer fonts not to be smoothed, so in gnome I use gnome-appearance-settings and set the smoothing option to 'none' (other options are 'gray scale' and 'subpixel'). How to configure those in xmonad?
The simple way is to set the corresponding X resources -- you're
probably after something like:
Xft.antialias: 0
Xft.hinting: 1
Xft.hintstyle: hintfull
Xft.rgba: rgb
This is what the GNOME settings system is actually doing underneath;
graphics toolkits like GTK and Qt then look at those resources to decide
how fonts should be rendered. (The usual place to put those lines is in
~/.Xresources, and you can load them into the X server by saying "xrdb
-merge ~/.Xresources".)
If you want to do something more complicated (e.g. you'd like to disable
antialiasing only for some fonts, or only beneath a certain size), you
can edit ~/.fonts.conf, which contains custom rules for the fontconfig
library that modern applications use to list and select fonts. If you
had a font called "Antenna" that you wanted to not be antialiased, then
you could say something like:
<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>
<fontconfig>
<match target="font">
<test name="family"><string>Antenna</string></test>
<edit name="antialias" mode="assign"><bool>false</bool></edit>
<edit name="hinting" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
<edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign"><const>hintfull</const></edit>
<edit name="rgba" mode="assign"><const>rgb</const></edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>
If you left out the
[...] how to set the background and text colors of applications in general?
For GTK applications, you can specify the font and theme by putting
something like this in ~/.gtkrc-2.0:
gtk-font-name = "Liberation Sans 11"
gtk-theme-name = "Xfce-curve"
--
Adam Sampson