I believe this is an overstrike or "fake bolding" issue. With such tiny fonts, it is essential to disable xterm's auto bolding feature, for example in ~/.Xresources as follows: *xterm.allowBoldFonts: false *vt100.allowBoldFonts: false
or alternatively set your bold font to match your normal font, e.g.: *xterm.font: 5x7 *xterm.boldFont: 5x7 In X, I just manually specify font from command line/ launch hotkey e.g.: xterm -fn -*-clean-medium-r-*-*-*-80-*-*-*-*-*-* \ -fb -*-clean-medium-r-*-*-*-80-*-*-*-*-*-* or e.g.: xterm -fn 5x7 -fb 5x7 This bug should be closed - the fonts are fine, it is just config if anything...
