urxvt

🚧 🆕 This page is new! Which also means it is under construction.

urxvt, or rxvt-unicode is a VT102 terminal emulator for the [X Windows System](X Windows System) forked from rxvt by Marc Lehmann. urxvt has many appealing features, such as transparency and 256 color support. Features We'll attempt to enable.

Prerequirements

urxvt appears to rely on Perl. Perl is installed by default, and is generally up to date. The current version of Perl include with Rapsbian and most other Linux systems is v5.20 or v5.20.2. Still the library wasn't installed so install libperl5.20 and libperl-dev.

urxvt will look for X and tic (which is part of terminfo). The best way to handle that is to install tmux before this.

Basically here's what I've come up with.

🔧 TODO: There may be more. Check the configuration step.

autoconf automake autotools libtool m4 perl libperl5.20 libperl-dev libstartup-notification0 libstartup-notification0-dev libtinfo-dev'

It would probably be ideal to install i3 first. It is also recommended to compose a ~/.Xresources file first to make urxvt usable. You'll need to install i3 AFTER urxvt if she wants.

Installation

It is super important that you add --enable-256-color to get 256 colors to work. Don't tinker with ~/.bashrc to get it to work, it won't work. Don't tinker with ~/.tmux.conf either because that won't work.) If you didn't do that, recompile urxvt.

By the way, --enable-everything DOES NOT "enable everything". According to the README.configure file, --enable-everything adds support for all non-multichoice options exception for --enable-assert and --enable-256-color so, we still will still need to use --enable-256-color. We don't need to worry about --enable-assertunless we are developing urxvt.

$ cd ~/Software
$ curl -SL http://dist.schmorp.de/rxvt-unicode/rxvt-unicode-9.22.tar.bz2 | tar xjv
$ cd rxvt-unicode-9.22
$ ./autogen.sh && ./configure --enable-everything --enable-256-color && make -j4 && sudo make install && sudo ldconfig

At the ./configure step, ENABLE EVERYTHING! Even if it breaks stuff (which only 1% of all the features may actually do that and even so you'll rarely use that 1%, you won't need to recompile urxvt over and over again if you forgot something.

🔧 TODO: See if I can/should use --enable-xft and --enable-transparency on a Raspberry Pi 2.

Composing the ~/.Xresources file

This file controls the appearance of not just urxvt but of a lot of other X11 applications like xpdf.

If you haven't installed the Powerline fonts for use with tmux, Vim or other applications that use Powerline, you should do that.

If you haven't installed Powerline, I recommend Liberation Mono as URXVT's font.

URxvt*font:		xft:Liberation Mono:size=10
URxvt*boldFont:		xft:Liberation Mono:bold:size=10
URxvt*italicFont:	xft:Liberation Mono:italic:autohint=true:size=10
URxvt*boldItalicFont:	xft:Liberation Mono:bold:italic:autohint=true:size=10

If you do have Powerline installed, we could try Literation Mono Powerline

URxvt*font:		xft:Literation Mono Powerline:size=10
URxvt*boldFont:		xft:Literation Mono Powerline:bold:size=10
URxvt*italicFont:	xft:Literation Mono Powerline:italic:autohint=true:size=10
URxvt*boldItalicFont:	xft:Literation Mono Powerline:bold:italic:autohint=true:size=10

Remember that if you change this, you will need to leave X. If you are using i3 that means you need to use Alt+Shift+E.

Setting urxvt up with i3

i3 opens terminal emulators using Alt+Enter. Raspbian still uses LXTerminal which programs like weechat have issues with because they use the F# keys. To set this as the default terminal, we need to edit ~/.xinitrc.

Copy and Paste

Not sure if there's anything special that I needed to add to the ~/.Xresoures file, but it appears newer versionos of URXVT now support Copy and Paste.

Use the mouse to select multiple lines or part of a single line and then press Ctrl+Alt+C to copy.

To paste, use Ctrl+Alt+V. It may take a secondif you have a lot of stuff open.

Unfortunately there is no Select All it seems. Although having a Select All and a Select None would be great.

This works across multiple urxvt terminals, at least it did when I was using i3 in Vim, of which don't forget to bein in INSERT MODE in Vim when you do this.

What can't urxvt use?

Some of the ranger stuff and alot of the w3m stuff. Hopefully, solutions can be derived. Until then, you may want to consider using xterm for some features. It can use them, but it needs work.

See also

• i3
• [X Windows System](X Windows System)

Related links

• http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/rxvt-unicode.html
• https://github.com/muennich/urxvt-perls
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/rxvt-unicode
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/X_resources
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xinitrc
• https://nixmeal.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/copypaste-text-in-urxvt-rxvt-unicode-using-keyboard/