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 It should be, starting with release 7.1. You are encouraged to
171 properly install urxvt with privileges necessary for your OS now.
173 When rxvt-unicode detects that it runs setuid or setgid, it will
174 fork into a helper process for privileged operations (pty handling
175 on some systems, utmp/wtmp/lastlog handling on others) and drop
176 privileges immediately. This is much safer than most other terminals
177 that keep privileges while running (but is more relevant to urxvt,
178 as it contains things as perl interpreters, which might be "helpful"
181 This forking is done as the very first within main(), which is very
182 early and reduces possible bugs to initialisation code run before
183 main(), or things like the dynamic loader of your system, which
184 should result in very little risk.
186 When I log-in to another system it tells me about missing terminfo data?
187 The terminal description used by rxvt-unicode is not as widely
188 available as that for xterm, or even rxvt (for which the same
189 problem often arises).
191 The correct solution for this problem is to install the terminfo,
192 this can be done like this (with ncurses' infocmp):
194 REMOTE=remotesystem.domain
195 infocmp rxvt-unicode | ssh $REMOTE "cat >/tmp/ti && tic /tmp/ti"
197 ... or by installing rxvt-unicode normally on the remote system,
199 If you cannot or do not want to do this, then you can simply set
200 "TERM=rxvt" or even "TERM=xterm", and live with the small number of
201 problems arising, which includes wrong keymapping, less and
202 different colours and some refresh errors in fullscreen
203 applications. It's a nice quick-and-dirty workaround for rare cases,
206 If you always want to do this (and are fine with the consequences)
207 you can either recompile rxvt-unicode with the desired TERM value or
208 use a resource to set it:
212 If you don't plan to use rxvt (quite common...) you could also
213 replace the rxvt terminfo file with the rxvt-unicode one.
215 "tic" outputs some error when compiling the terminfo entry.
216 Most likely it's the empty definition for "enacs=". Just replace it
217 by "enacs=\E[0@" and try again.
219 "bash"'s readline does not work correctly under rxvt.
220 I need a termcap file entry.
221 One reason you might want this is that some distributions or
222 operating systems still compile some programs using the
223 long-obsoleted termcap library (Fedora Core's bash is one example)
224 and rely on a termcap entry for "rxvt-unicode".
226 You could use rxvt's termcap entry with resonable results in many
227 cases. You can also create a termcap entry by using terminfo's
228 infocmp program like this:
230 infocmp -C rxvt-unicode
232 Or you could use this termcap entry, generated by the command above:
234 rxvt-unicode|rxvt-unicode terminal (X Window System):\
235 :am:bw:eo:km:mi:ms:xn:xo:\
236 :co#80:it#8:li#24:lm#0:\
237 :AL=\E[%dL:DC=\E[%dP:DL=\E[%dM:DO=\E[%dB:IC=\E[%d@:\
238 :K1=\EOw:K2=\EOu:K3=\EOy:K4=\EOq:K5=\EOs:LE=\E[%dD:\
239 :RI=\E[%dC:SF=\E[%dS:SR=\E[%dT:UP=\E[%dA:ae=\E(B:al=\E[L:\
240 :as=\E(0:bl=^G:cd=\E[J:ce=\E[K:cl=\E[H\E[2J:\
241 :cm=\E[%i%d;%dH:cr=^M:cs=\E[%i%d;%dr:ct=\E[3g:dc=\E[P:\
242 :dl=\E[M:do=^J:ec=\E[%dX:ei=\E[4l:ho=\E[H:\
243 :i1=\E[?47l\E=\E[?1l:ic=\E[@:im=\E[4h:\
244 :is=\E[r\E[m\E[2J\E[H\E[?7h\E[?1;3;4;6l\E[4l:\
245 :k1=\E[11~:k2=\E[12~:k3=\E[13~:k4=\E[14~:k5=\E[15~:\
246 :k6=\E[17~:k7=\E[18~:k8=\E[19~:k9=\E[20~:kD=\E[3~:\
247 :kI=\E[2~:kN=\E[6~:kP=\E[5~:kb=\177:kd=\EOB:ke=\E[?1l\E>:\
248 :kh=\E[7~:kl=\EOD:kr=\EOC:ks=\E[?1h\E=:ku=\EOA:le=^H:\
249 :mb=\E[5m:md=\E[1m:me=\E[m\017:mr=\E[7m:nd=\E[C:rc=\E8:\
250 :sc=\E7:se=\E[27m:sf=^J:so=\E[7m:sr=\EM:st=\EH:ta=^I:\
251 :te=\E[r\E[?1049l:ti=\E[?1049h:ue=\E[24m:up=\E[A:\
252 :us=\E[4m:vb=\E[?5h\E[?5l:ve=\E[?25h:vi=\E[?25l:\
255 Why does "ls" no longer have coloured output?
256 The "ls" in the GNU coreutils unfortunately doesn't use terminfo to
257 decide wether a terminal has colour, but uses it's own configuration
258 file. Needless to say, "rxvt-unicode" is not in it's default file
259 (among with most other terminals supporting colour). Either add:
263 to "/etc/DIR_COLORS" or simply add:
265 alias ls='ls --color=auto'
267 to your ".profile" or ".bashrc".
269 Why doesn't vim/emacs etc. use the 88 colour mode?
270 Why doesn't vim/emacs etc. make use of italic?
271 Why are the secondary screen-related options not working properly?
272 Make sure you are using "TERM=rxvt-unicode". Some pre-packaged
273 distributions (most notably Debian GNU/Linux) break rxvt-unicode by
274 setting "TERM" to "rxvt", which doesn't have these extra features.
275 Unfortunately, some of these (most notably, again, Debian GNU/Linux)
276 furthermore fail to even install the "rxvt-unicode" terminfo file,
277 so you will need to install it on your own (See the question When I
278 log-in to another system it tells me about missing terminfo data? on
281 My numerical keypad acts weird and generates differing output?
282 Some Debian GNUL/Linux users seem to have this problem, although no
283 specific details were reported so far. It is possible that this is
284 caused by the wrong "TERM" setting, although the details of wether
285 and how this can happen are unknown, as "TERM=rxvt" should offer a
286 compatible keymap. See the answer to the previous question, and
287 please report if that helped.
289 Rxvt-unicode does not seem to understand the selected encoding?
290 Unicode does not seem to work?
291 If you encounter strange problems like typing an accented character
292 but getting two unrelated other characters or similar, or if program
293 output is subtly garbled, then you should check your locale
296 Rxvt-unicode must be started with the same "LC_CTYPE" setting as the
297 programs. Often rxvt-unicode is started in the "C" locale, while the
298 login script running within the rxvt-unicode window changes the
299 locale to something else, e.g. "en_GB.UTF-8". Needless to say, this
300 is not going to work.
302 The best thing is to fix your startup environment, as you will
303 likely run into other problems. If nothing works you can try this in
306 printf '\e]701;%s\007' "$LC_CTYPE"
308 If this doesn't work, then maybe you use a "LC_CTYPE" specification
309 not supported on your systems. Some systems have a "locale" command
310 which displays this (also, "perl -e0" can be used to check locale
311 settings, as it will complain loudly if it cannot set the locale).
312 If it displays something like:
314 locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: ...
316 Then the locale you specified is not supported on your system.
318 If nothing works and you are sure that everything is set correctly
319 then you will need to remember a little known fact: Some programs
320 just don't support locales :(
322 Why do some characters look so much different than others?
323 How does rxvt-unicode choose fonts?
324 Most fonts do not contain the full range of Unicode, which is fine.
325 Chances are that the font you (or the admin/package maintainer of
326 your system/os) have specified does not cover all the characters you
329 rxvt-unicode makes a best-effort try at finding a replacement font.
330 Often the result is fine, but sometimes the chosen font looks
331 bad/ugly/wrong. Some fonts have totally strange characters that
332 don't resemble the correct glyph at all, and rxvt-unicode lacks the
333 artificial intelligence to detect that a specific glyph is wrong: it
334 has to believe the font that the characters it claims to contain
337 In that case, select a font of your taste and add it to the font
340 rxvt -fn basefont,font2,font3...
342 When rxvt-unicode sees a character, it will first look at the base
343 font. If the base font does not contain the character, it will go to
344 the next font, and so on. Specifying your own fonts will also speed
345 up this search and use less resources within rxvt-unicode and the
348 The only limitation is that none of the fonts may be larger than the
349 base font, as the base font defines the terminal character cell
350 size, which must be the same due to the way terminals work.
352 Why do some chinese characters look so different than others?
353 This is because there is a difference between script and language --
354 rxvt-unicode does not know which language the text that is output
355 is, as it only knows the unicode character codes. If rxvt-unicode
356 first sees a japanese/chinese character, it might choose a japanese
357 font for display. Subsequent japanese characters will use that font.
358 Now, many chinese characters aren't represented in japanese fonts,
359 so when the first non-japanese character comes up, rxvt-unicode will
360 look for a chinese font -- unfortunately at this point, it will
361 still use the japanese font for chinese characters that are also in
364 The workaround is easy: just tag a chinese font at the end of your
365 font list (see the previous question). The key is to view the font
366 list as a preference list: If you expect more japanese, list a
367 japanese font first. If you expect more chinese, put a chinese font
370 In the future it might be possible to switch language preferences at
371 runtime (the internal data structure has no problem with using
372 different fonts for the same character at the same time, but no
373 interface for this has been designed yet).
375 Until then, you might get away with switching fonts at runtime (see
376 "Can I switch the fonts at runtime?" later in this document).
378 Why does rxvt-unicode sometimes leave pixel droppings?
379 Most fonts were not designed for terminal use, which means that
380 character size varies a lot. A font that is otherwise fine for
381 terminal use might contain some characters that are simply too wide.
382 Rxvt-unicode will avoid these characters. For characters that are
383 just "a bit" too wide a special "careful" rendering mode is used
384 that redraws adjacent characters.
386 All of this requires that fonts do not lie about character sizes,
387 however: Xft fonts often draw glyphs larger than their acclaimed
388 bounding box, and rxvt-unicode has no way of detecting this (the
389 correct way is to ask for the character bounding box, which
390 unfortunately is wrong in these cases).
392 It's not clear (to me at least), wether this is a bug in Xft,
393 freetype, or the respective font. If you encounter this problem you
394 might try using the "-lsp" option to give the font more height. If
395 that doesn't work, you might be forced to use a different font.
397 All of this is not a problem when using X11 core fonts, as their
398 bounding box data is correct.
400 On Solaris 9, many line-drawing characters are too wide.
401 Seems to be a known bug, read
402 <http://nixdoc.net/files/forum/about34198.html>. Some people use the
403 following ugly workaround to get non-double-wide-characters working:
405 #define wcwidth(x) wcwidth(x) > 1 ? 1 : wcwidth(x)
407 My Compose (Multi_key) key is no longer working.
408 The most common causes for this are that either your locale is not
409 set correctly, or you specified a preeditStyle that is not supported
410 by your input method. For example, if you specified OverTheSpot and
411 your input method (e.g. the default input method handling Compose
412 keys) does not support this (for instance because it is not visual),
413 then rxvt-unicode will continue without an input method.
415 In this case either do not specify a preeditStyle or specify more
416 than one pre-edit style, such as OverTheSpot,Root,None.
418 I cannot type "Ctrl-Shift-2" to get an ASCII NUL character due to ISO
420 Either try "Ctrl-2" alone (it often is mapped to ASCII NUL even on
421 international keyboards) or simply use ISO 14755 support to your
422 advantage, typing <Ctrl-Shift-0> to get a ASCII NUL. This works for
423 other codes, too, such as "Ctrl-Shift-1-d" to type the default
424 telnet escape character and so on.
426 How can I keep rxvt-unicode from using reverse video so much?
427 First of all, make sure you are running with the right terminal
428 settings ("TERM=rxvt-unicode"), which will get rid of most of these
429 effects. Then make sure you have specified colours for italic and
430 bold, as otherwise rxvt-unicode might use reverse video to simulate
436 Some programs assume totally weird colours (red instead of blue), how
438 For some unexplainable reason, some rare programs assume a very
439 weird colour palette when confronted with a terminal with more than
440 the standard 8 colours (rxvt-unicode supports 88). The right fix is,
441 of course, to fix these programs not to assume non-ISO colours
442 without very good reasons.
444 In the meantime, you can either edit your "rxvt-unicode" terminfo
445 definition to only claim 8 colour support or use "TERM=rxvt", which
446 will fix colours but keep you from using other rxvt-unicode
449 I am on FreeBSD and rxvt-unicode does not seem to work at all.
450 Rxvt-unicode requires the symbol "__STDC_ISO_10646__" to be defined
451 in your compile environment, or an implementation that implements
452 it, wether it defines the symbol or not. "__STDC_ISO_10646__"
453 requires that wchar_t is represented as unicode.
455 As you might have guessed, FreeBSD does neither define this symobl
456 nor does it support it. Instead, it uses it's own internal
457 representation of wchar_t. This is, of course, completely fine with
458 respect to standards.
460 However, that means rxvt-unicode only works in "POSIX", "ISO-8859-1"
461 and "UTF-8" locales under FreeBSD (which all use Unicode as wchar_t.
463 "__STDC_ISO_10646__" is the only sane way to support multi-language
464 apps in an OS, as using a locale-dependent (and non-standardized)
465 representation of wchar_t makes it impossible to convert between
466 wchar_t (as used by X11 and your applications) and any other
467 encoding without implementing OS-specific-wrappers for each and
468 every locale. There simply are no APIs to convert wchar_t into
469 anything except the current locale encoding.
471 Some applications (such as the formidable mlterm) work around this
472 by carrying their own replacement functions for character set
473 handling with them, and either implementing OS-dependent hacks or
474 doing multiple conversions (which is slow and unreliable in case the
475 OS implements encodings slightly different than the terminal
478 The rxvt-unicode author insists that the right way to fix this is in
479 the system libraries once and for all, instead of forcing every app
480 to carry complete replacements for them :)
482 I use Solaris 9 and it doesn't compile/work/etc.
483 Try the diff in doc/solaris9.patch as a base. It fixes the worst
484 problems with "wcwidth" and a compile problem.
486 How can I use rxvt-unicode under cygwin?
487 rxvt-unicode should compile and run out of the box on cygwin, using
488 the X11 libraries that come with cygwin. libW11 emulation is no
489 longer supported (and makes no sense, either, as it only supported a
490 single font). I recommend starting the X-server in "-multiwindow" or
491 "-rootless" mode instead, which will result in similar look&feel as
492 the old libW11 emulation.
494 At the time of this writing, cygwin didn't seem to support any
495 multi-byte encodings (you might try "LC_CTYPE=C-UTF-8"), so you are
496 likely limited to 8-bit encodings.
498 How does rxvt-unicode determine the encoding to use?
499 Is there an option to switch encodings?
500 Unlike some other terminals, rxvt-unicode has no encoding switch,
501 and no specific "utf-8" mode, such as xterm. In fact, it doesn't
502 even know about UTF-8 or any other encodings with respect to
505 The reasons is that there exists a perfectly fine mechanism for
506 selecting the encoding, doing I/O and (most important) communicating
507 this to all applications so everybody agrees on character properties
508 such as width and code number. This mechanism is the *locale*.
509 Applications not using that info will have problems (for example,
510 "xterm" gets the width of characters wrong as it uses it's own,
511 locale-independent table under all locales).
513 Rxvt-unicode uses the "LC_CTYPE" locale category to select encoding.
514 All programs doing the same (that is, most) will automatically agree
515 in the interpretation of characters.
517 Unfortunately, there is no system-independent way to select locales,
518 nor is there a standard on how locale specifiers will look like.
520 On most systems, the content of the "LC_CTYPE" environment variable
521 contains an arbitrary string which corresponds to an
522 already-installed locale. Common names for locales are
523 "en_US.UTF-8", "de_DE.ISO-8859-15", "ja_JP.EUC-JP", i.e.
524 "language_country.encoding", but other forms (i.e. "de" or "german")
527 Rxvt-unicode ignores all other locale categories, and except for the
528 encoding, ignores country or language-specific settings, i.e.
529 "de_DE.UTF-8" and "ja_JP.UTF-8" are the normally same to
532 If you want to use a specific encoding you have to make sure you
533 start rxvt-unicode with the correct "LC_CTYPE" category.
535 Can I switch locales at runtime?
536 Yes, using an escape sequence. Try something like this, which sets
537 rxvt-unicode's idea of "LC_CTYPE".
539 printf '\e]701;%s\007' ja_JP.SJIS
541 See also the previous answer.
543 Sometimes this capability is rather handy when you want to work in
544 one locale (e.g. "de_DE.UTF-8") but some programs don't support it
545 (e.g. UTF-8). For example, I use this script to start "xjdic", which
546 first switches to a locale supported by xjdic and back later:
548 printf '\e]701;%s\007' ja_JP.SJIS
550 printf '\e]701;%s\007' de_DE.UTF-8
552 You can also use xterm's "luit" program, which usually works fine,
553 except for some locales where character width differs between
554 program- and rxvt-unicode-locales.
556 Can I switch the fonts at runtime?
557 Yes, using an escape sequence. Try something like this, which has
558 the same effect as using the "-fn" switch, and takes effect
561 printf '\e]50;%s\007' "9x15bold,xft:Kochi Gothic"
563 This is useful if you e.g. work primarily with japanese (and prefer
564 a japanese font), but you have to switch to chinese temporarily,
565 where japanese fonts would only be in your way.
567 You can think of this as a kind of manual ISO-2022 switching.
569 Why do italic characters look as if clipped?
570 Many fonts have difficulties with italic characters and hinting. For
571 example, the otherwise very nicely hinted font "xft:Bitstream Vera
572 Sans Mono" completely fails in it's italic face. A workaround might
573 be to enable freetype autohinting, i.e. like this:
575 URxvt.italicFont: xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:italic:autohint=true
576 URxvt.boldItalicFont: xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:bold:italic:autohint=true
578 My input method wants <some encoding> but I want UTF-8, what can I do?
579 You can specify separate locales for the input method and the rest
580 of the terminal, using the resource "imlocale":
582 URxvt.imlocale: ja_JP.EUC-JP
584 Now you can start your terminal with "LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8" and
585 still use your input method. Please note, however, that you will not
586 be able to input characters outside "EUC-JP" in a normal way then,
587 as your input method limits you.
589 Rxvt-unicode crashes when the X Input Method changes or exits.
590 Unfortunately, this is unavoidable, as the XIM protocol is racy by
591 design. Applications can avoid some crashes at the expense of memory
592 leaks, and Input Methods can avoid some crashes by careful ordering
593 at exit time. kinput2 (and derived input methods) generally
594 succeeds, while SCIM (or similar input methods) fails. In the end,
595 however, crashes cannot be completely avoided even if both sides
598 So the only workaround is not to kill your Input Method Servers.
600 Rxvt-unicode uses gobs of memory, how can I reduce that?
601 Rxvt-unicode tries to obey the rule of not charging you for
602 something you don't use. One thing you should try is to configure
603 out all settings that you don't need, for example, Xft support is a
604 resource hog by design, when used. Compiling it out ensures that no
605 Xft font will be loaded accidentally when rxvt-unicode tries to find
606 a font for your characters.
608 Also, many people (me included) like large windows and even larger
609 scrollback buffers: Without "--enable-unicode3", rxvt-unicode will
610 use 6 bytes per screen cell. For a 160x?? window this amounts to
611 almost a kilobyte per line. A scrollback buffer of 10000 lines will
612 then (if full) use 10 Megabytes of memory. With "--enable-unicode3"
613 it gets worse, as rxvt-unicode then uses 8 bytes per screen cell.
615 Can I speed up Xft rendering somehow?
616 Yes, the most obvious way to speed it up is to avoid Xft entirely,
617 as it is simply slow. If you still want Xft fonts you might try to
618 disable antialiasing (by appending ":antialias=false"), which saves
619 lots of memory and also speeds up rendering considerably.
621 Rxvt-unicode doesn't seem to anti-alias its fonts, what is wrong?
622 Rxvt-unicode will use whatever you specify as a font. If it needs to
623 fall back to it's default font search list it will prefer X11 core
624 fonts, because they are small and fast, and then use Xft fonts. It
625 has antialiasing disabled for most of them, because the author
626 thinks they look best that way.
628 If you want antialiasing, you have to specify the fonts manually.
630 Mouse cut/paste suddenly no longer works.
631 Make sure that mouse reporting is actually turned off since killing
632 some editors prematurely may leave the mouse in mouse report mode.
633 I've heard that tcsh may use mouse reporting unless it otherwise
634 specified. A quick check is to see if cut/paste works when the Alt
635 or Shift keys are depressed.
637 What's with this bold/blink stuff?
638 If no bold colour is set via "colorBD:", bold will invert text using
639 the standard foreground colour.
641 For the standard background colour, blinking will actually make the
642 text blink when compiled with "--enable-blinking". with standard
643 colours. Without "--enable-blinking", the blink attribute will be
646 On ANSI colours, bold/blink attributes are used to set
647 high-intensity foreground/background colors.
649 color0-7 are the low-intensity colors.
651 color8-15 are the corresponding high-intensity colors.
653 I don't like the screen colors. How do I change them?
654 You can change the screen colors at run-time using ~/.Xdefaults
655 resources (or as long-options).
657 Here are values that are supposed to resemble a VGA screen,
658 including the murky brown that passes for low-intensity yellow:
660 URxvt.color0: #000000
661 URxvt.color1: #A80000
662 URxvt.color2: #00A800
663 URxvt.color3: #A8A800
664 URxvt.color4: #0000A8
665 URxvt.color5: #A800A8
666 URxvt.color6: #00A8A8
667 URxvt.color7: #A8A8A8
669 URxvt.color8: #000054
670 URxvt.color9: #FF0054
671 URxvt.color10: #00FF54
672 URxvt.color11: #FFFF54
673 URxvt.color12: #0000FF
674 URxvt.color13: #FF00FF
675 URxvt.color14: #00FFFF
676 URxvt.color15: #FFFFFF
678 And here is a more complete set of non-standard colors described
679 (not by me) as "pretty girly".
681 URxvt.cursorColor: #dc74d1
682 URxvt.pointerColor: #dc74d1
683 URxvt.background: #0e0e0e
684 URxvt.foreground: #4ad5e1
685 URxvt.color0: #000000
686 URxvt.color8: #8b8f93
687 URxvt.color1: #dc74d1
688 URxvt.color9: #dc74d1
689 URxvt.color2: #0eb8c7
690 URxvt.color10: #0eb8c7
691 URxvt.color3: #dfe37e
692 URxvt.color11: #dfe37e
693 URxvt.color5: #9e88f0
694 URxvt.color13: #9e88f0
695 URxvt.color6: #73f7ff
696 URxvt.color14: #73f7ff
697 URxvt.color7: #e1dddd
698 URxvt.color15: #e1dddd
700 How can I start rxvtd in a race-free way?
701 Try "rxvtd -f -o", which tells rxvtd to open the display, create the
702 listening socket and then fork.
704 What's with the strange Backspace/Delete key behaviour?
705 Assuming that the physical Backspace key corresponds to the
706 BackSpace keysym (not likely for Linux ... see the following
707 question) there are two standard values that can be used for
708 Backspace: "^H" and "^?".
710 Historically, either value is correct, but rxvt-unicode adopts the
711 debian policy of using "^?" when unsure, because it's the one only
712 only correct choice :).
714 Rxvt-unicode tries to inherit the current stty settings and uses the
715 value of `erase' to guess the value for backspace. If rxvt-unicode
716 wasn't started from a terminal (say, from a menu or by remote
717 shell), then the system value of `erase', which corresponds to
718 CERASE in <termios.h>, will be used (which may not be the same as
721 For starting a new rxvt-unicode:
731 Toggle with "ESC [ 36 h" / "ESC [ 36 l".
733 For an existing rxvt-unicode:
743 This helps satisfy some of the Backspace discrepancies that occur,
744 but if you use Backspace = "^H", make sure that the termcap/terminfo
745 value properly reflects that.
747 The Delete key is a another casualty of the ill-defined Backspace
748 problem. To avoid confusion between the Backspace and Delete keys,
749 the Delete key has been assigned an escape sequence to match the
750 vt100 for Execute ("ESC [ 3 ~") and is in the supplied
753 Some other Backspace problems:
755 some editors use termcap/terminfo, some editors (vim I'm told)
756 expect Backspace = ^H, GNU Emacs (and Emacs-like editors) use ^H for
759 Perhaps someday this will all be resolved in a consistent manner.
761 I don't like the key-bindings. How do I change them?
762 There are some compile-time selections available via configure.
763 Unless you have run "configure" with the "--disable-resources"
764 option you can use the `keysym' resource to alter the keystrings
765 associated with keysyms.
767 Here's an example for a URxvt session started using "rxvt -name
770 URxvt.keysym.Home: \033[1~
771 URxvt.keysym.End: \033[4~
772 URxvt.keysym.C-apostrophe: \033<C-'>
773 URxvt.keysym.C-slash: \033<C-/>
774 URxvt.keysym.C-semicolon: \033<C-;>
775 URxvt.keysym.C-grave: \033<C-`>
776 URxvt.keysym.C-comma: \033<C-,>
777 URxvt.keysym.C-period: \033<C-.>
778 URxvt.keysym.C-0x60: \033<C-`>
779 URxvt.keysym.C-Tab: \033<C-Tab>
780 URxvt.keysym.C-Return: \033<C-Return>
781 URxvt.keysym.S-Return: \033<S-Return>
782 URxvt.keysym.S-space: \033<S-Space>
783 URxvt.keysym.M-Up: \033<M-Up>
784 URxvt.keysym.M-Down: \033<M-Down>
785 URxvt.keysym.M-Left: \033<M-Left>
786 URxvt.keysym.M-Right: \033<M-Right>
787 URxvt.keysym.M-C-0: list \033<M-C- 0123456789 >
788 URxvt.keysym.M-C-a: list \033<M-C- abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz >
789 URxvt.keysym.F12: command:\033]701;zh_CN.GBK\007
791 See some more examples in the documentation for the keysym resource.
793 I'm using keyboard model XXX that has extra Prior/Next/Insert keys. How
794 do I make use of them? For example, the Sun Keyboard type 4 has the
795 following mappings that rxvt-unicode doesn't recognize.
803 Rather than have rxvt-unicode try to accommodate all the various
804 possible keyboard mappings, it is better to use `xmodmap' to remap
805 the keys as required for your particular machine.
807 How do I distinguish wether I'm running rxvt-unicode or a regular xterm?
808 I need this to decide about setting colors etc.
809 rxvt and rxvt-unicode always export the variable "COLORTERM", so you
810 can check and see if that is set. Note that several programs, JED,
811 slrn, Midnight Commander automatically check this variable to decide
812 whether or not to use color.
814 How do I set the correct, full IP address for the DISPLAY variable?
815 If you've compiled rxvt-unicode with DISPLAY_IS_IP and have enabled
816 insecure mode then it is possible to use the following shell script
817 snippets to correctly set the display. If your version of
818 rxvt-unicode wasn't also compiled with ESCZ_ANSWER (as assumed in
819 these snippets) then the COLORTERM variable can be used to
820 distinguish rxvt-unicode from a regular xterm.
822 Courtesy of Chuck Blake <cblake@BBN.COM> with the following shell
825 # Bourne/Korn/POSIX family of shells:
826 [ ${TERM:-foo} = foo ] && TERM=xterm # assume an xterm if we don't know
827 if [ ${TERM:-foo} = xterm ]; then
828 stty -icanon -echo min 0 time 15 # see if enhanced rxvt or not
832 if [ ""${term_id} = '^[[?1;2C' -a ${DISPLAY:-foo} = foo ]; then
833 echo -n '^[[7n' # query the rxvt we are in for the DISPLAY string
834 read DISPLAY # set it in our local shell
838 How do I compile the manual pages for myself?
839 You need to have a recent version of perl installed as
840 /usr/bin/perl, one that comes with pod2man, pod2text and pod2html.
841 Then go to the doc subdirectory and enter "make alldoc".
843 My question isn't answered here, can I ask a human?
844 Before sending me mail, you could go to IRC: "irc.freenode.net",
845 channel "#rxvt-unicode" has some rxvt-unicode enthusiasts that might
846 be interested in learning about new and exciting problems (but not
projects / dana / urxvt.git / blob