frame size and background color settings

frame size and background color settings

[Charles Muller]

I am a newbie, presently  experimenting and learning with both Emacs
and Xemacs. The Emacs package that came with my Red Hat 7.3 distro
came set up with a nice black-text, white-background setting that I
like. I figured out how to set the fonts and frame size to my liking
with .emacs file.

I have been trying to duplicate this with Xemacs, but trying to sort
out the information on this seems to be a bit more confusing, since I
have found explanations for doing this in the .emacs file, the
.Xdefaults file, and the custom.el file.

The font changes that I made in Xemacs were saved to custom.el. When I
made frame size changes doing like

(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(height . 25))

in init.el, they take effect when I start Xemacs from the Red Hat
Desktop icon, but not when I start from the command line. Other
sources seem to say that I should be using a setting like

Xemacs+geometry....

in .Xdefaults, but AFAICT, my system does not yet have this
file. Apparently there are different ways of doing this.

Can someone outline the main points of Xemacs-specific methods of
setting background color and frame size? (Version 21.4.6)

Much appreciated,

Chuck 

-----------------------
Charles Muller
Digital CJKV-English Dictioaries
www.acmuller.net