1 FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
2 The new selection selects pieces that are too big, how can I select
4 Yes. For example, if you want to select alphanumeric words, you can
5 use the following resource:
7 URxvt.selection.pattern-0: ([[:word:]]+)
9 If you click more than twice, the selection will be extended more
12 To get a selection that is very similar to the old code, try this
15 URxvt.selection.pattern-0: ([^"&'()*,;<=>?@[\\\\]^`{|})]+)
17 Please also note that the *LeftClick Shift-LeftClik* combination
18 also selects words like the old code.
20 I don't like the new selection/popups/hotkeys/perl, how do I
22 You can disable the perl extension completely by setting the
23 perl-ext-common resource to the empty string, which also keeps
24 rxvt-unicode from initialising perl, saving memory.
26 If you only want to disable specific features, you first have to
27 identify which perl extension is responsible. For this, read the
28 section PREPACKAGED EXTENSIONS in the rxvtperl(3) manpage. For
29 example, to disable the selection-popup and option-popup, specify
30 this perl-ext-common resource:
32 URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,-selection-popup,-option-popup
34 This will keep the default extensions, but disable the two popup
35 extensions. Some extensions can also be configured, for example,
36 scrollback search mode is triggered by M-s. You can move it to any
37 other combination either by setting the searchable-scrollback
40 URxvt.searchable-scrollback: CM-s
42 Isn't rxvt supposed to be small? Don't all those features bloat?
43 I often get asked about this, and I think, no, they didn't cause
44 extra bloat. If you compare a minimal rxvt and a minimal urxvt, you
45 can see that the urxvt binary is larger (due to some encoding tables
46 always being compiled in), but it actually uses less memory (RSS)
47 after startup. Even with "--disable-everything", this comparison is
48 a bit unfair, as many features unique to urxvt (locale, encoding
49 conversion, iso14755 etc.) are already in use in this mode.
51 text data bss drs rss filename
52 98398 1664 24 15695 1824 rxvt --disable-everything
53 188985 9048 66616 18222 1788 urxvt --disable-everything
55 When you "--enable-everything" (which _is_ unfair, as this involves
56 xft and full locale/XIM support which are quite bloaty inside libX11
57 and my libc), the two diverge, but not unreasnobaly so.
59 text data bss drs rss filename
60 163431 2152 24 20123 2060 rxvt --enable-everything
61 1035683 49680 66648 29096 3680 urxvt --enable-everything
63 The very large size of the text section is explained by the
64 east-asian encoding tables, which, if unused, take up disk space but
65 nothing else and can be compiled out unless you rely on X11 core
66 fonts that use those encodings. The BSS size comes from the 64k
67 emergency buffer that my c++ compiler allocates (but of course
68 doesn't use unless you are out of memory). Also, using an xft font
69 instead of a core font immediately adds a few megabytes of RSS. Xft
70 indeed is responsible for a lot of RSS even when not used.
72 Of course, due to every character using two or four bytes instead of
73 one, a large scrollback buffer will ultimately make rxvt-unicode use
76 Compared to e.g. Eterm (5112k), aterm (3132k) and xterm (4680k),
77 this still fares rather well. And compared to some monsters like
78 gnome-terminal (21152k + extra 4204k in separate processes) or
79 konsole (22200k + extra 43180k in daemons that stay around after
80 exit, plus half a minute of startup time, including the hundreds of
81 warnings it spits out), it fares extremely well *g*.
83 Why C++, isn't that unportable/bloated/uncool?
84 Is this a question? :) It comes up very often. The simple answer is:
85 I had to write it, and C++ allowed me to write and maintain it in a
86 fraction of the time and effort (which is a scarce resource for me).
87 Put even shorter: It simply wouldn't exist without C++.
89 My personal stance on this is that C++ is less portable than C, but
90 in the case of rxvt-unicode this hardly matters, as its portability
91 limits are defined by things like X11, pseudo terminals, locale
92 support and unix domain sockets, which are all less portable than
95 Regarding the bloat, see the above question: It's easy to write
96 programs in C that use gobs of memory, an certainly possible to
97 write programs in C++ that don't. C++ also often comes with large
98 libraries, but this is not necessarily the case with GCC. Here is
99 what rxvt links against on my system with a minimal config:
101 libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x00002aaaaabc3000)
102 libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00002aaaaadde000)
103 libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00002aaaab01d000)
104 /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00002aaaaaaab000)
106 And here is rxvt-unicode:
108 libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x00002aaaaabc3000)
109 libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00002aaaaada2000)
110 libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00002aaaaaeb0000)
111 libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00002aaaab0ee000)
112 /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00002aaaaaaab000)
114 No large bloated libraries (of course, none were linked in
115 statically), except maybe libX11 :)
117 Does it support tabs, can I have a tabbed rxvt-unicode?
118 rxvt-unicode does not directly support tabs. It will work fine with
119 tabbing functionality of many window managers or similar tabbing
120 programs, and its embedding-features allow it to be embedded into
121 other programs, as witnessed by doc/rxvt-tabbed or the upcoming
122 "Gtk2::URxvt" perl module, which features a tabbed urxvt (murxvt)
123 terminal as an example embedding application.
125 How do I know which rxvt-unicode version I'm using?
126 The version number is displayed with the usage (-h). Also the escape
127 sequence "ESC [ 8 n" sets the window title to the version number.
128 When using the rxvtc client, the version displayed is that of the
131 I am using Debian GNU/Linux and have a problem...
132 The Debian GNU/Linux package of rxvt-unicode in sarge contains large
133 patches that considerably change the behaviour of rxvt-unicode.
134 Before reporting a bug to the original rxvt-unicode author please
135 download and install the genuine version
136 (<http://software.schmorp.de#rxvt-unicode>) and try to reproduce the
137 problem. If you cannot, chances are that the problems are specific
138 to Debian GNU/Linux, in which case it should be reported via the
139 Debian Bug Tracking System (use "reportbug" to report the bug).
141 For other problems that also affect the Debian package, you can and
142 probably should use the Debian BTS, too, because, after all, it's
143 also a bug in the Debian version and it serves as a reminder for
144 other users that might encounter the same issue.
146 I am maintaining rxvt-unicode for distribution/OS XXX, any
148 You should build one binary with the default options. configure now
149 enables most useful options, and the trend goes to making them
150 runtime-switchable, too, so there is usually no drawback to enbaling
151 them, except higher disk and possibly memory usage. The perl
152 interpreter should be enabled, as important functionality (menus,
153 selection, likely more in the future) depends on it.
155 You should not overwrite the "perl-ext-common" snd "perl-ext"
156 resources system-wide (except maybe with "defaults"). This will
157 result in useful behaviour. If your distribution aims at low memory,
158 add an empty "perl-ext-common" resource to the app-defaults file.
159 This will keep the perl interpreter disabled until the user enables
162 If you can/want build more binaries, I recommend building a minimal
163 one with "--disable-everything" (very useful) and a maximal one with
164 "--enable-everything" (less useful, it will be very big due to a lot
165 of encodings built-in that increase download times and are rarely
168 I need to make it setuid/setgid to support utmp/ptys on my OS, is this
170 Likely not. While I honestly try to make it secure, and am probably
171 not bad at it, I think it is simply unreasonable to expect all of
172 freetype + fontconfig + xft + xlib + perl + ... + rxvt-unicode
173 itself to all be secure. Also, rxvt-unicode disables some options
174 when it detects that it runs setuid or setgid, which is not nice.
175 Besides, with the embedded perl interpreter the possibility for
176 security problems easily multiplies.
178 Elevated privileges are only required for utmp and pty operations on
179 some systems (for example, GNU/Linux doesn't need any extra
180 privileges for ptys, but some need it for utmp support). It is
181 planned to mvoe this into a forked handler process, but this is not
184 So, while setuid/setgid operation is supported and not a problem on
185 your typical single-user-no-other-logins unix desktop, always
186 remember that its an awful lot of code, most of which isn't checked
187 for security issues regularly.
189 When I log-in to another system it tells me about missing terminfo data?
190 The terminal description used by rxvt-unicode is not as widely
191 available as that for xterm, or even rxvt (for which the same
192 problem often arises).
194 The correct solution for this problem is to install the terminfo,
195 this can be done like this (with ncurses' infocmp):
197 REMOTE=remotesystem.domain
198 infocmp rxvt-unicode | ssh $REMOTE "cat >/tmp/ti && tic /tmp/ti"
200 ... or by installing rxvt-unicode normally on the remote system,
202 If you cannot or do not want to do this, then you can simply set
203 "TERM=rxvt" or even "TERM=xterm", and live with the small number of
204 problems arising, which includes wrong keymapping, less and
205 different colours and some refresh errors in fullscreen
206 applications. It's a nice quick-and-dirty workaround for rare cases,
209 If you always want to do this (and are fine with the consequences)
210 you can either recompile rxvt-unicode with the desired TERM value or
211 use a resource to set it:
215 If you don't plan to use rxvt (quite common...) you could also
216 replace the rxvt terminfo file with the rxvt-unicode one.
218 "tic" outputs some error when compiling the terminfo entry.
219 Most likely it's the empty definition for "enacs=". Just replace it
220 by "enacs=\E[0@" and try again.
222 "bash"'s readline does not work correctly under rxvt.
223 I need a termcap file entry.
224 One reason you might want this is that some distributions or
225 operating systems still compile some programs using the
226 long-obsoleted termcap library (Fedora Core's bash is one example)
227 and rely on a termcap entry for "rxvt-unicode".
229 You could use rxvt's termcap entry with resonable results in many
230 cases. You can also create a termcap entry by using terminfo's
231 infocmp program like this:
233 infocmp -C rxvt-unicode
235 Or you could use this termcap entry, generated by the command above:
237 rxvt-unicode|rxvt-unicode terminal (X Window System):\
238 :am:bw:eo:km:mi:ms:xn:xo:\
239 :co#80:it#8:li#24:lm#0:\
240 :AL=\E[%dL:DC=\E[%dP:DL=\E[%dM:DO=\E[%dB:IC=\E[%d@:\
241 :K1=\EOw:K2=\EOu:K3=\EOy:K4=\EOq:K5=\EOs:LE=\E[%dD:\
242 :RI=\E[%dC:SF=\E[%dS:SR=\E[%dT:UP=\E[%dA:ae=\E(B:al=\E[L:\
243 :as=\E(0:bl=^G:cd=\E[J:ce=\E[K:cl=\E[H\E[2J:\
244 :cm=\E[%i%d;%dH:cr=^M:cs=\E[%i%d;%dr:ct=\E[3g:dc=\E[P:\
245 :dl=\E[M:do=^J:ec=\E[%dX:ei=\E[4l:ho=\E[H:\
246 :i1=\E[?47l\E=\E[?1l:ic=\E[@:im=\E[4h:\
247 :is=\E[r\E[m\E[2J\E[H\E[?7h\E[?1;3;4;6l\E[4l:\
248 :k1=\E[11~:k2=\E[12~:k3=\E[13~:k4=\E[14~:k5=\E[15~:\
249 :k6=\E[17~:k7=\E[18~:k8=\E[19~:k9=\E[20~:kD=\E[3~:\
250 :kI=\E[2~:kN=\E[6~:kP=\E[5~:kb=\177:kd=\EOB:ke=\E[?1l\E>:\
251 :kh=\E[7~:kl=\EOD:kr=\EOC:ks=\E[?1h\E=:ku=\EOA:le=^H:\
252 :mb=\E[5m:md=\E[1m:me=\E[m\017:mr=\E[7m:nd=\E[C:rc=\E8:\
253 :sc=\E7:se=\E[27m:sf=^J:so=\E[7m:sr=\EM:st=\EH:ta=^I:\
254 :te=\E[r\E[?1049l:ti=\E[?1049h:ue=\E[24m:up=\E[A:\
255 :us=\E[4m:vb=\E[?5h\E[?5l:ve=\E[?25h:vi=\E[?25l:\
258 Why does "ls" no longer have coloured output?
259 The "ls" in the GNU coreutils unfortunately doesn't use terminfo to
260 decide wether a terminal has colour, but uses it's own configuration
261 file. Needless to say, "rxvt-unicode" is not in it's default file
262 (among with most other terminals supporting colour). Either add:
266 to "/etc/DIR_COLORS" or simply add:
268 alias ls='ls --color=auto'
270 to your ".profile" or ".bashrc".
272 Why doesn't vim/emacs etc. use the 88 colour mode?
273 Why doesn't vim/emacs etc. make use of italic?
274 Why are the secondary screen-related options not working properly?
275 Make sure you are using "TERM=rxvt-unicode". Some pre-packaged
276 distributions (most notably Debian GNU/Linux) break rxvt-unicode by
277 setting "TERM" to "rxvt", which doesn't have these extra features.
278 Unfortunately, some of these (most notably, again, Debian GNU/Linux)
279 furthermore fail to even install the "rxvt-unicode" terminfo file,
280 so you will need to install it on your own (See the question When I
281 log-in to another system it tells me about missing terminfo data? on
284 My numerical keypad acts weird and generates differing output?
285 Some Debian GNUL/Linux users seem to have this problem, although no
286 specific details were reported so far. It is possible that this is
287 caused by the wrong "TERM" setting, although the details of wether
288 and how this can happen are unknown, as "TERM=rxvt" should offer a
289 compatible keymap. See the answer to the previous question, and
290 please report if that helped.
292 Rxvt-unicode does not seem to understand the selected encoding?
293 Unicode does not seem to work?
294 If you encounter strange problems like typing an accented character
295 but getting two unrelated other characters or similar, or if program
296 output is subtly garbled, then you should check your locale
299 Rxvt-unicode must be started with the same "LC_CTYPE" setting as the
300 programs. Often rxvt-unicode is started in the "C" locale, while the
301 login script running within the rxvt-unicode window changes the
302 locale to something else, e.g. "en_GB.UTF-8". Needless to say, this
303 is not going to work.
305 The best thing is to fix your startup environment, as you will
306 likely run into other problems. If nothing works you can try this in
309 printf '\e]701;%s\007' "$LC_CTYPE"
311 If this doesn't work, then maybe you use a "LC_CTYPE" specification
312 not supported on your systems. Some systems have a "locale" command
313 which displays this (also, "perl -e0" can be used to check locale
314 settings, as it will complain loudly if it cannot set the locale).
315 If it displays something like:
317 locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: ...
319 Then the locale you specified is not supported on your system.
321 If nothing works and you are sure that everything is set correctly
322 then you will need to remember a little known fact: Some programs
323 just don't support locales :(
325 Why do some characters look so much different than others?
326 How does rxvt-unicode choose fonts?
327 Most fonts do not contain the full range of Unicode, which is fine.
328 Chances are that the font you (or the admin/package maintainer of
329 your system/os) have specified does not cover all the characters you
332 rxvt-unicode makes a best-effort try at finding a replacement font.
333 Often the result is fine, but sometimes the chosen font looks
334 bad/ugly/wrong. Some fonts have totally strange characters that
335 don't resemble the correct glyph at all, and rxvt-unicode lacks the
336 artificial intelligence to detect that a specific glyph is wrong: it
337 has to believe the font that the characters it claims to contain
340 In that case, select a font of your taste and add it to the font
343 rxvt -fn basefont,font2,font3...
345 When rxvt-unicode sees a character, it will first look at the base
346 font. If the base font does not contain the character, it will go to
347 the next font, and so on. Specifying your own fonts will also speed
348 up this search and use less resources within rxvt-unicode and the
351 The only limitation is that none of the fonts may be larger than the
352 base font, as the base font defines the terminal character cell
353 size, which must be the same due to the way terminals work.
355 Why do some chinese characters look so different than others?
356 This is because there is a difference between script and language --
357 rxvt-unicode does not know which language the text that is output
358 is, as it only knows the unicode character codes. If rxvt-unicode
359 first sees a japanese/chinese character, it might choose a japanese
360 font for display. Subsequent japanese characters will use that font.
361 Now, many chinese characters aren't represented in japanese fonts,
362 so when the first non-japanese character comes up, rxvt-unicode will
363 look for a chinese font -- unfortunately at this point, it will
364 still use the japanese font for chinese characters that are also in
367 The workaround is easy: just tag a chinese font at the end of your
368 font list (see the previous question). The key is to view the font
369 list as a preference list: If you expect more japanese, list a
370 japanese font first. If you expect more chinese, put a chinese font
373 In the future it might be possible to switch language preferences at
374 runtime (the internal data structure has no problem with using
375 different fonts for the same character at the same time, but no
376 interface for this has been designed yet).
378 Until then, you might get away with switching fonts at runtime (see
379 "Can I switch the fonts at runtime?" later in this document).
381 Why does rxvt-unicode sometimes leave pixel droppings?
382 Most fonts were not designed for terminal use, which means that
383 character size varies a lot. A font that is otherwise fine for
384 terminal use might contain some characters that are simply too wide.
385 Rxvt-unicode will avoid these characters. For characters that are
386 just "a bit" too wide a special "careful" rendering mode is used
387 that redraws adjacent characters.
389 All of this requires that fonts do not lie about character sizes,
390 however: Xft fonts often draw glyphs larger than their acclaimed
391 bounding box, and rxvt-unicode has no way of detecting this (the
392 correct way is to ask for the character bounding box, which
393 unfortunately is wrong in these cases).
395 It's not clear (to me at least), wether this is a bug in Xft,
396 freetype, or the respective font. If you encounter this problem you
397 might try using the "-lsp" option to give the font more height. If
398 that doesn't work, you might be forced to use a different font.
400 All of this is not a problem when using X11 core fonts, as their
401 bounding box data is correct.
403 On Solaris 9, many line-drawing characters are too wide.
404 Seems to be a known bug, read
405 <http://nixdoc.net/files/forum/about34198.html>. Some people use the
406 following ugly workaround to get non-double-wide-characters working:
408 #define wcwidth(x) wcwidth(x) > 1 ? 1 : wcwidth(x)
410 My Compose (Multi_key) key is no longer working.
411 The most common causes for this are that either your locale is not
412 set correctly, or you specified a preeditStyle that is not supported
413 by your input method. For example, if you specified OverTheSpot and
414 your input method (e.g. the default input method handling Compose
415 keys) does not support this (for instance because it is not visual),
416 then rxvt-unicode will continue without an input method.
418 In this case either do not specify a preeditStyle or specify more
419 than one pre-edit style, such as OverTheSpot,Root,None.
421 I cannot type "Ctrl-Shift-2" to get an ASCII NUL character due to ISO
423 Either try "Ctrl-2" alone (it often is mapped to ASCII NUL even on
424 international keyboards) or simply use ISO 14755 support to your
425 advantage, typing <Ctrl-Shift-0> to get a ASCII NUL. This works for
426 other codes, too, such as "Ctrl-Shift-1-d" to type the default
427 telnet escape character and so on.
429 How can I keep rxvt-unicode from using reverse video so much?
430 First of all, make sure you are running with the right terminal
431 settings ("TERM=rxvt-unicode"), which will get rid of most of these
432 effects. Then make sure you have specified colours for italic and
433 bold, as otherwise rxvt-unicode might use reverse video to simulate
439 Some programs assume totally weird colours (red instead of blue), how
441 For some unexplainable reason, some rare programs assume a very
442 weird colour palette when confronted with a terminal with more than
443 the standard 8 colours (rxvt-unicode supports 88). The right fix is,
444 of course, to fix these programs not to assume non-ISO colours
445 without very good reasons.
447 In the meantime, you can either edit your "rxvt-unicode" terminfo
448 definition to only claim 8 colour support or use "TERM=rxvt", which
449 will fix colours but keep you from using other rxvt-unicode
452 I am on FreeBSD and rxvt-unicode does not seem to work at all.
453 Rxvt-unicode requires the symbol "__STDC_ISO_10646__" to be defined
454 in your compile environment, or an implementation that implements
455 it, wether it defines the symbol or not. "__STDC_ISO_10646__"
456 requires that wchar_t is represented as unicode.
458 As you might have guessed, FreeBSD does neither define this symobl
459 nor does it support it. Instead, it uses it's own internal
460 representation of wchar_t. This is, of course, completely fine with
461 respect to standards.
463 However, that means rxvt-unicode only works in "POSIX", "ISO-8859-1"
464 and "UTF-8" locales under FreeBSD (which all use Unicode as wchar_t.
466 "__STDC_ISO_10646__" is the only sane way to support multi-language
467 apps in an OS, as using a locale-dependent (and non-standardized)
468 representation of wchar_t makes it impossible to convert between
469 wchar_t (as used by X11 and your applications) and any other
470 encoding without implementing OS-specific-wrappers for each and
471 every locale. There simply are no APIs to convert wchar_t into
472 anything except the current locale encoding.
474 Some applications (such as the formidable mlterm) work around this
475 by carrying their own replacement functions for character set
476 handling with them, and either implementing OS-dependent hacks or
477 doing multiple conversions (which is slow and unreliable in case the
478 OS implements encodings slightly different than the terminal
481 The rxvt-unicode author insists that the right way to fix this is in
482 the system libraries once and for all, instead of forcing every app
483 to carry complete replacements for them :)
485 I use Solaris 9 and it doesn't compile/work/etc.
486 Try the diff in doc/solaris9.patch as a base. It fixes the worst
487 problems with "wcwidth" and a compile problem.
489 How can I use rxvt-unicode under cygwin?
490 rxvt-unicode should compile and run out of the box on cygwin, using
491 the X11 libraries that come with cygwin. libW11 emulation is no
492 longer supported (and makes no sense, either, as it only supported a
493 single font). I recommend starting the X-server in "-multiwindow" or
494 "-rootless" mode instead, which will result in similar look&feel as
495 the old libW11 emulation.
497 At the time of this writing, cygwin didn't seem to support any
498 multi-byte encodings (you might try "LC_CTYPE=C-UTF-8"), so you are
499 likely limited to 8-bit encodings.
501 How does rxvt-unicode determine the encoding to use?
502 Is there an option to switch encodings?
503 Unlike some other terminals, rxvt-unicode has no encoding switch,
504 and no specific "utf-8" mode, such as xterm. In fact, it doesn't
505 even know about UTF-8 or any other encodings with respect to
508 The reasons is that there exists a perfectly fine mechanism for
509 selecting the encoding, doing I/O and (most important) communicating
510 this to all applications so everybody agrees on character properties
511 such as width and code number. This mechanism is the *locale*.
512 Applications not using that info will have problems (for example,
513 "xterm" gets the width of characters wrong as it uses it's own,
514 locale-independent table under all locales).
516 Rxvt-unicode uses the "LC_CTYPE" locale category to select encoding.
517 All programs doing the same (that is, most) will automatically agree
518 in the interpretation of characters.
520 Unfortunately, there is no system-independent way to select locales,
521 nor is there a standard on how locale specifiers will look like.
523 On most systems, the content of the "LC_CTYPE" environment variable
524 contains an arbitrary string which corresponds to an
525 already-installed locale. Common names for locales are
526 "en_US.UTF-8", "de_DE.ISO-8859-15", "ja_JP.EUC-JP", i.e.
527 "language_country.encoding", but other forms (i.e. "de" or "german")
530 Rxvt-unicode ignores all other locale categories, and except for the
531 encoding, ignores country or language-specific settings, i.e.
532 "de_DE.UTF-8" and "ja_JP.UTF-8" are the normally same to
535 If you want to use a specific encoding you have to make sure you
536 start rxvt-unicode with the correct "LC_CTYPE" category.
538 Can I switch locales at runtime?
539 Yes, using an escape sequence. Try something like this, which sets
540 rxvt-unicode's idea of "LC_CTYPE".
542 printf '\e]701;%s\007' ja_JP.SJIS
544 See also the previous answer.
546 Sometimes this capability is rather handy when you want to work in
547 one locale (e.g. "de_DE.UTF-8") but some programs don't support it
548 (e.g. UTF-8). For example, I use this script to start "xjdic", which
549 first switches to a locale supported by xjdic and back later:
551 printf '\e]701;%s\007' ja_JP.SJIS
553 printf '\e]701;%s\007' de_DE.UTF-8
555 You can also use xterm's "luit" program, which usually works fine,
556 except for some locales where character width differs between
557 program- and rxvt-unicode-locales.
559 Can I switch the fonts at runtime?
560 Yes, using an escape sequence. Try something like this, which has
561 the same effect as using the "-fn" switch, and takes effect
564 printf '\e]50;%s\007' "9x15bold,xft:Kochi Gothic"
566 This is useful if you e.g. work primarily with japanese (and prefer
567 a japanese font), but you have to switch to chinese temporarily,
568 where japanese fonts would only be in your way.
570 You can think of this as a kind of manual ISO-2022 switching.
572 Why do italic characters look as if clipped?
573 Many fonts have difficulties with italic characters and hinting. For
574 example, the otherwise very nicely hinted font "xft:Bitstream Vera
575 Sans Mono" completely fails in it's italic face. A workaround might
576 be to enable freetype autohinting, i.e. like this:
578 URxvt.italicFont: xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:italic:autohint=true
579 URxvt.boldItalicFont: xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:bold:italic:autohint=true
581 My input method wants <some encoding> but I want UTF-8, what can I do?
582 You can specify separate locales for the input method and the rest
583 of the terminal, using the resource "imlocale":
585 URxvt.imlocale: ja_JP.EUC-JP
587 Now you can start your terminal with "LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8" and
588 still use your input method. Please note, however, that you will not
589 be able to input characters outside "EUC-JP" in a normal way then,
590 as your input method limits you.
592 Rxvt-unicode crashes when the X Input Method changes or exits.
593 Unfortunately, this is unavoidable, as the XIM protocol is racy by
594 design. Applications can avoid some crashes at the expense of memory
595 leaks, and Input Methods can avoid some crashes by careful ordering
596 at exit time. kinput2 (and derived input methods) generally
597 succeeds, while SCIM (or similar input methods) fails. In the end,
598 however, crashes cannot be completely avoided even if both sides
601 So the only workaround is not to kill your Input Method Servers.
603 Rxvt-unicode uses gobs of memory, how can I reduce that?
604 Rxvt-unicode tries to obey the rule of not charging you for
605 something you don't use. One thing you should try is to configure
606 out all settings that you don't need, for example, Xft support is a
607 resource hog by design, when used. Compiling it out ensures that no
608 Xft font will be loaded accidentally when rxvt-unicode tries to find
609 a font for your characters.
611 Also, many people (me included) like large windows and even larger
612 scrollback buffers: Without "--enable-unicode3", rxvt-unicode will
613 use 6 bytes per screen cell. For a 160x?? window this amounts to
614 almost a kilobyte per line. A scrollback buffer of 10000 lines will
615 then (if full) use 10 Megabytes of memory. With "--enable-unicode3"
616 it gets worse, as rxvt-unicode then uses 8 bytes per screen cell.
618 Can I speed up Xft rendering somehow?
619 Yes, the most obvious way to speed it up is to avoid Xft entirely,
620 as it is simply slow. If you still want Xft fonts you might try to
621 disable antialiasing (by appending ":antialias=false"), which saves
622 lots of memory and also speeds up rendering considerably.
624 Rxvt-unicode doesn't seem to anti-alias its fonts, what is wrong?
625 Rxvt-unicode will use whatever you specify as a font. If it needs to
626 fall back to it's default font search list it will prefer X11 core
627 fonts, because they are small and fast, and then use Xft fonts. It
628 has antialiasing disabled for most of them, because the author
629 thinks they look best that way.
631 If you want antialiasing, you have to specify the fonts manually.
633 Mouse cut/paste suddenly no longer works.
634 Make sure that mouse reporting is actually turned off since killing
635 some editors prematurely may leave the mouse in mouse report mode.
636 I've heard that tcsh may use mouse reporting unless it otherwise
637 specified. A quick check is to see if cut/paste works when the Alt
638 or Shift keys are depressed.
640 What's with this bold/blink stuff?
641 If no bold colour is set via "colorBD:", bold will invert text using
642 the standard foreground colour.
644 For the standard background colour, blinking will actually make the
645 text blink when compiled with "--enable-blinking". with standard
646 colours. Without "--enable-blinking", the blink attribute will be
649 On ANSI colours, bold/blink attributes are used to set
650 high-intensity foreground/background colors.
652 color0-7 are the low-intensity colors.
654 color8-15 are the corresponding high-intensity colors.
656 I don't like the screen colors. How do I change them?
657 You can change the screen colors at run-time using ~/.Xdefaults
658 resources (or as long-options).
660 Here are values that are supposed to resemble a VGA screen,
661 including the murky brown that passes for low-intensity yellow:
663 URxvt.color0: #000000
664 URxvt.color1: #A80000
665 URxvt.color2: #00A800
666 URxvt.color3: #A8A800
667 URxvt.color4: #0000A8
668 URxvt.color5: #A800A8
669 URxvt.color6: #00A8A8
670 URxvt.color7: #A8A8A8
672 URxvt.color8: #000054
673 URxvt.color9: #FF0054
674 URxvt.color10: #00FF54
675 URxvt.color11: #FFFF54
676 URxvt.color12: #0000FF
677 URxvt.color13: #FF00FF
678 URxvt.color14: #00FFFF
679 URxvt.color15: #FFFFFF
681 And here is a more complete set of non-standard colors described
682 (not by me) as "pretty girly".
684 URxvt.cursorColor: #dc74d1
685 URxvt.pointerColor: #dc74d1
686 URxvt.background: #0e0e0e
687 URxvt.foreground: #4ad5e1
688 URxvt.color0: #000000
689 URxvt.color8: #8b8f93
690 URxvt.color1: #dc74d1
691 URxvt.color9: #dc74d1
692 URxvt.color2: #0eb8c7
693 URxvt.color10: #0eb8c7
694 URxvt.color3: #dfe37e
695 URxvt.color11: #dfe37e
696 URxvt.color5: #9e88f0
697 URxvt.color13: #9e88f0
698 URxvt.color6: #73f7ff
699 URxvt.color14: #73f7ff
700 URxvt.color7: #e1dddd
701 URxvt.color15: #e1dddd
703 How can I start rxvtd in a race-free way?
704 Try "rxvtd -f -o", which tells rxvtd to open the display, create the
705 listening socket and then fork.
707 What's with the strange Backspace/Delete key behaviour?
708 Assuming that the physical Backspace key corresponds to the
709 BackSpace keysym (not likely for Linux ... see the following
710 question) there are two standard values that can be used for
711 Backspace: "^H" and "^?".
713 Historically, either value is correct, but rxvt-unicode adopts the
714 debian policy of using "^?" when unsure, because it's the one only
715 only correct choice :).
717 Rxvt-unicode tries to inherit the current stty settings and uses the
718 value of `erase' to guess the value for backspace. If rxvt-unicode
719 wasn't started from a terminal (say, from a menu or by remote
720 shell), then the system value of `erase', which corresponds to
721 CERASE in <termios.h>, will be used (which may not be the same as
724 For starting a new rxvt-unicode:
734 Toggle with "ESC [ 36 h" / "ESC [ 36 l".
736 For an existing rxvt-unicode:
746 This helps satisfy some of the Backspace discrepancies that occur,
747 but if you use Backspace = "^H", make sure that the termcap/terminfo
748 value properly reflects that.
750 The Delete key is a another casualty of the ill-defined Backspace
751 problem. To avoid confusion between the Backspace and Delete keys,
752 the Delete key has been assigned an escape sequence to match the
753 vt100 for Execute ("ESC [ 3 ~") and is in the supplied
756 Some other Backspace problems:
758 some editors use termcap/terminfo, some editors (vim I'm told)
759 expect Backspace = ^H, GNU Emacs (and Emacs-like editors) use ^H for
762 Perhaps someday this will all be resolved in a consistent manner.
764 I don't like the key-bindings. How do I change them?
765 There are some compile-time selections available via configure.
766 Unless you have run "configure" with the "--disable-resources"
767 option you can use the `keysym' resource to alter the keystrings
768 associated with keysyms.
770 Here's an example for a URxvt session started using "rxvt -name
773 URxvt.keysym.Home: \033[1~
774 URxvt.keysym.End: \033[4~
775 URxvt.keysym.C-apostrophe: \033<C-'>
776 URxvt.keysym.C-slash: \033<C-/>
777 URxvt.keysym.C-semicolon: \033<C-;>
778 URxvt.keysym.C-grave: \033<C-`>
779 URxvt.keysym.C-comma: \033<C-,>
780 URxvt.keysym.C-period: \033<C-.>
781 URxvt.keysym.C-0x60: \033<C-`>
782 URxvt.keysym.C-Tab: \033<C-Tab>
783 URxvt.keysym.C-Return: \033<C-Return>
784 URxvt.keysym.S-Return: \033<S-Return>
785 URxvt.keysym.S-space: \033<S-Space>
786 URxvt.keysym.M-Up: \033<M-Up>
787 URxvt.keysym.M-Down: \033<M-Down>
788 URxvt.keysym.M-Left: \033<M-Left>
789 URxvt.keysym.M-Right: \033<M-Right>
790 URxvt.keysym.M-C-0: list \033<M-C- 0123456789 >
791 URxvt.keysym.M-C-a: list \033<M-C- abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz >
792 URxvt.keysym.F12: command:\033]701;zh_CN.GBK\007
794 See some more examples in the documentation for the keysym resource.
796 I'm using keyboard model XXX that has extra Prior/Next/Insert keys. How
797 do I make use of them? For example, the Sun Keyboard type 4 has the
798 following mappings that rxvt-unicode doesn't recognize.
806 Rather than have rxvt-unicode try to accommodate all the various
807 possible keyboard mappings, it is better to use `xmodmap' to remap
808 the keys as required for your particular machine.
810 How do I distinguish wether I'm running rxvt-unicode or a regular xterm?
811 I need this to decide about setting colors etc.
812 rxvt and rxvt-unicode always export the variable "COLORTERM", so you
813 can check and see if that is set. Note that several programs, JED,
814 slrn, Midnight Commander automatically check this variable to decide
815 whether or not to use color.
817 How do I set the correct, full IP address for the DISPLAY variable?
818 If you've compiled rxvt-unicode with DISPLAY_IS_IP and have enabled
819 insecure mode then it is possible to use the following shell script
820 snippets to correctly set the display. If your version of
821 rxvt-unicode wasn't also compiled with ESCZ_ANSWER (as assumed in
822 these snippets) then the COLORTERM variable can be used to
823 distinguish rxvt-unicode from a regular xterm.
825 Courtesy of Chuck Blake <cblake@BBN.COM> with the following shell
828 # Bourne/Korn/POSIX family of shells:
829 [ ${TERM:-foo} = foo ] && TERM=xterm # assume an xterm if we don't know
830 if [ ${TERM:-foo} = xterm ]; then
831 stty -icanon -echo min 0 time 15 # see if enhanced rxvt or not
835 if [ ""${term_id} = '^[[?1;2C' -a ${DISPLAY:-foo} = foo ]; then
836 echo -n '^[[7n' # query the rxvt we are in for the DISPLAY string
837 read DISPLAY # set it in our local shell
841 How do I compile the manual pages for myself?
842 You need to have a recent version of perl installed as
843 /usr/bin/perl, one that comes with pod2man, pod2text and pod2html.
844 Then go to the doc subdirectory and enter "make alldoc".
846 My question isn't answered here, can I ask a human?
847 Before sending me mail, you could go to IRC: "irc.freenode.net",
848 channel "#rxvt-unicode" has some rxvt-unicode enthusiasts that might
849 be interested in learning about new and exciting problems (but not
projects / dana / urxvt.git / blob