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 Beginning with version 7.3, there is a perl extension that
119 implements a simple tabbed terminal. It is installed by default, so
120 any of these should give you tabs:
124 URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,tabbed
126 It will also work fine with tabbing functionality of many window
127 managers or similar tabbing programs, and its embedding-features
128 allow it to be embedded into other programs, as witnessed by
129 doc/rxvt-tabbed or the upcoming "Gtk2::URxvt" perl module, which
130 features a tabbed urxvt (murxvt) terminal as an example embedding
133 How do I know which rxvt-unicode version I'm using?
134 The version number is displayed with the usage (-h). Also the escape
135 sequence "ESC [ 8 n" sets the window title to the version number.
136 When using the rxvtc client, the version displayed is that of the
139 I am using Debian GNU/Linux and have a problem...
140 The Debian GNU/Linux package of rxvt-unicode in sarge contains large
141 patches that considerably change the behaviour of rxvt-unicode (but
142 unfortunately this notice has been removed). Before reporting a bug
143 to the original rxvt-unicode author please download and install the
144 genuine version (<http://software.schmorp.de#rxvt-unicode>) and try
145 to reproduce the problem. If you cannot, chances are that the
146 problems are specific to Debian GNU/Linux, in which case it should
147 be reported via the Debian Bug Tracking System (use "reportbug" to
150 For other problems that also affect the Debian package, you can and
151 probably should use the Debian BTS, too, because, after all, it's
152 also a bug in the Debian version and it serves as a reminder for
153 other users that might encounter the same issue.
155 I am maintaining rxvt-unicode for distribution/OS XXX, any
157 You should build one binary with the default options. configure now
158 enables most useful options, and the trend goes to making them
159 runtime-switchable, too, so there is usually no drawback to enbaling
160 them, except higher disk and possibly memory usage. The perl
161 interpreter should be enabled, as important functionality (menus,
162 selection, likely more in the future) depends on it.
164 You should not overwrite the "perl-ext-common" snd "perl-ext"
165 resources system-wide (except maybe with "defaults"). This will
166 result in useful behaviour. If your distribution aims at low memory,
167 add an empty "perl-ext-common" resource to the app-defaults file.
168 This will keep the perl interpreter disabled until the user enables
171 If you can/want build more binaries, I recommend building a minimal
172 one with "--disable-everything" (very useful) and a maximal one with
173 "--enable-everything" (less useful, it will be very big due to a lot
174 of encodings built-in that increase download times and are rarely
177 I need to make it setuid/setgid to support utmp/ptys on my OS, is this
179 It should be, starting with release 7.1. You are encouraged to
180 properly install urxvt with privileges necessary for your OS now.
182 When rxvt-unicode detects that it runs setuid or setgid, it will
183 fork into a helper process for privileged operations (pty handling
184 on some systems, utmp/wtmp/lastlog handling on others) and drop
185 privileges immediately. This is much safer than most other terminals
186 that keep privileges while running (but is more relevant to urxvt,
187 as it contains things as perl interpreters, which might be "helpful"
190 This forking is done as the very first within main(), which is very
191 early and reduces possible bugs to initialisation code run before
192 main(), or things like the dynamic loader of your system, which
193 should result in very little risk.
195 When I log-in to another system it tells me about missing terminfo data?
196 The terminal description used by rxvt-unicode is not as widely
197 available as that for xterm, or even rxvt (for which the same
198 problem often arises).
200 The correct solution for this problem is to install the terminfo,
201 this can be done like this (with ncurses' infocmp):
203 REMOTE=remotesystem.domain
204 infocmp rxvt-unicode | ssh $REMOTE "cat >/tmp/ti && tic /tmp/ti"
206 ... or by installing rxvt-unicode normally on the remote system,
208 If you cannot or do not want to do this, then you can simply set
209 "TERM=rxvt" or even "TERM=xterm", and live with the small number of
210 problems arising, which includes wrong keymapping, less and
211 different colours and some refresh errors in fullscreen
212 applications. It's a nice quick-and-dirty workaround for rare cases,
215 If you always want to do this (and are fine with the consequences)
216 you can either recompile rxvt-unicode with the desired TERM value or
217 use a resource to set it:
221 If you don't plan to use rxvt (quite common...) you could also
222 replace the rxvt terminfo file with the rxvt-unicode one.
224 "tic" outputs some error when compiling the terminfo entry.
225 Most likely it's the empty definition for "enacs=". Just replace it
226 by "enacs=\E[0@" and try again.
228 "bash"'s readline does not work correctly under rxvt.
229 I need a termcap file entry.
230 One reason you might want this is that some distributions or
231 operating systems still compile some programs using the
232 long-obsoleted termcap library (Fedora Core's bash is one example)
233 and rely on a termcap entry for "rxvt-unicode".
235 You could use rxvt's termcap entry with resonable results in many
236 cases. You can also create a termcap entry by using terminfo's
237 infocmp program like this:
239 infocmp -C rxvt-unicode
241 Or you could use this termcap entry, generated by the command above:
243 rxvt-unicode|rxvt-unicode terminal (X Window System):\
244 :am:bw:eo:km:mi:ms:xn:xo:\
245 :co#80:it#8:li#24:lm#0:\
246 :AL=\E[%dL:DC=\E[%dP:DL=\E[%dM:DO=\E[%dB:IC=\E[%d@:\
247 :K1=\EOw:K2=\EOu:K3=\EOy:K4=\EOq:K5=\EOs:LE=\E[%dD:\
248 :RI=\E[%dC:SF=\E[%dS:SR=\E[%dT:UP=\E[%dA:ae=\E(B:al=\E[L:\
249 :as=\E(0:bl=^G:cd=\E[J:ce=\E[K:cl=\E[H\E[2J:\
250 :cm=\E[%i%d;%dH:cr=^M:cs=\E[%i%d;%dr:ct=\E[3g:dc=\E[P:\
251 :dl=\E[M:do=^J:ec=\E[%dX:ei=\E[4l:ho=\E[H:\
252 :i1=\E[?47l\E=\E[?1l:ic=\E[@:im=\E[4h:\
253 :is=\E[r\E[m\E[2J\E[H\E[?7h\E[?1;3;4;6l\E[4l:\
254 :k1=\E[11~:k2=\E[12~:k3=\E[13~:k4=\E[14~:k5=\E[15~:\
255 :k6=\E[17~:k7=\E[18~:k8=\E[19~:k9=\E[20~:kD=\E[3~:\
256 :kI=\E[2~:kN=\E[6~:kP=\E[5~:kb=\177:kd=\EOB:ke=\E[?1l\E>:\
257 :kh=\E[7~:kl=\EOD:kr=\EOC:ks=\E[?1h\E=:ku=\EOA:le=^H:\
258 :mb=\E[5m:md=\E[1m:me=\E[m\017:mr=\E[7m:nd=\E[C:rc=\E8:\
259 :sc=\E7:se=\E[27m:sf=^J:so=\E[7m:sr=\EM:st=\EH:ta=^I:\
260 :te=\E[r\E[?1049l:ti=\E[?1049h:ue=\E[24m:up=\E[A:\
261 :us=\E[4m:vb=\E[?5h\E[?5l:ve=\E[?25h:vi=\E[?25l:\
264 Why does "ls" no longer have coloured output?
265 The "ls" in the GNU coreutils unfortunately doesn't use terminfo to
266 decide wether a terminal has colour, but uses it's own configuration
267 file. Needless to say, "rxvt-unicode" is not in it's default file
268 (among with most other terminals supporting colour). Either add:
272 to "/etc/DIR_COLORS" or simply add:
274 alias ls='ls --color=auto'
276 to your ".profile" or ".bashrc".
278 Why doesn't vim/emacs etc. use the 88 colour mode?
279 Why doesn't vim/emacs etc. make use of italic?
280 Why are the secondary screen-related options not working properly?
281 Make sure you are using "TERM=rxvt-unicode". Some pre-packaged
282 distributions (most notably Debian GNU/Linux) break rxvt-unicode by
283 setting "TERM" to "rxvt", which doesn't have these extra features.
284 Unfortunately, some of these (most notably, again, Debian GNU/Linux)
285 furthermore fail to even install the "rxvt-unicode" terminfo file,
286 so you will need to install it on your own (See the question When I
287 log-in to another system it tells me about missing terminfo data? on
290 My numerical keypad acts weird and generates differing output?
291 Some Debian GNUL/Linux users seem to have this problem, although no
292 specific details were reported so far. It is possible that this is
293 caused by the wrong "TERM" setting, although the details of wether
294 and how this can happen are unknown, as "TERM=rxvt" should offer a
295 compatible keymap. See the answer to the previous question, and
296 please report if that helped.
298 Rxvt-unicode does not seem to understand the selected encoding?
299 Unicode does not seem to work?
300 If you encounter strange problems like typing an accented character
301 but getting two unrelated other characters or similar, or if program
302 output is subtly garbled, then you should check your locale
305 Rxvt-unicode must be started with the same "LC_CTYPE" setting as the
306 programs. Often rxvt-unicode is started in the "C" locale, while the
307 login script running within the rxvt-unicode window changes the
308 locale to something else, e.g. "en_GB.UTF-8". Needless to say, this
309 is not going to work.
311 The best thing is to fix your startup environment, as you will
312 likely run into other problems. If nothing works you can try this in
315 printf '\e]701;%s\007' "$LC_CTYPE"
317 If this doesn't work, then maybe you use a "LC_CTYPE" specification
318 not supported on your systems. Some systems have a "locale" command
319 which displays this (also, "perl -e0" can be used to check locale
320 settings, as it will complain loudly if it cannot set the locale).
321 If it displays something like:
323 locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: ...
325 Then the locale you specified is not supported on your system.
327 If nothing works and you are sure that everything is set correctly
328 then you will need to remember a little known fact: Some programs
329 just don't support locales :(
331 Why do some characters look so much different than others?
332 How does rxvt-unicode choose fonts?
333 Most fonts do not contain the full range of Unicode, which is fine.
334 Chances are that the font you (or the admin/package maintainer of
335 your system/os) have specified does not cover all the characters you
338 rxvt-unicode makes a best-effort try at finding a replacement font.
339 Often the result is fine, but sometimes the chosen font looks
340 bad/ugly/wrong. Some fonts have totally strange characters that
341 don't resemble the correct glyph at all, and rxvt-unicode lacks the
342 artificial intelligence to detect that a specific glyph is wrong: it
343 has to believe the font that the characters it claims to contain
346 In that case, select a font of your taste and add it to the font
349 rxvt -fn basefont,font2,font3...
351 When rxvt-unicode sees a character, it will first look at the base
352 font. If the base font does not contain the character, it will go to
353 the next font, and so on. Specifying your own fonts will also speed
354 up this search and use less resources within rxvt-unicode and the
357 The only limitation is that none of the fonts may be larger than the
358 base font, as the base font defines the terminal character cell
359 size, which must be the same due to the way terminals work.
361 Why do some chinese characters look so different than others?
362 This is because there is a difference between script and language --
363 rxvt-unicode does not know which language the text that is output
364 is, as it only knows the unicode character codes. If rxvt-unicode
365 first sees a japanese/chinese character, it might choose a japanese
366 font for display. Subsequent japanese characters will use that font.
367 Now, many chinese characters aren't represented in japanese fonts,
368 so when the first non-japanese character comes up, rxvt-unicode will
369 look for a chinese font -- unfortunately at this point, it will
370 still use the japanese font for chinese characters that are also in
373 The workaround is easy: just tag a chinese font at the end of your
374 font list (see the previous question). The key is to view the font
375 list as a preference list: If you expect more japanese, list a
376 japanese font first. If you expect more chinese, put a chinese font
379 In the future it might be possible to switch language preferences at
380 runtime (the internal data structure has no problem with using
381 different fonts for the same character at the same time, but no
382 interface for this has been designed yet).
384 Until then, you might get away with switching fonts at runtime (see
385 "Can I switch the fonts at runtime?" later in this document).
387 Why does rxvt-unicode sometimes leave pixel droppings?
388 Most fonts were not designed for terminal use, which means that
389 character size varies a lot. A font that is otherwise fine for
390 terminal use might contain some characters that are simply too wide.
391 Rxvt-unicode will avoid these characters. For characters that are
392 just "a bit" too wide a special "careful" rendering mode is used
393 that redraws adjacent characters.
395 All of this requires that fonts do not lie about character sizes,
396 however: Xft fonts often draw glyphs larger than their acclaimed
397 bounding box, and rxvt-unicode has no way of detecting this (the
398 correct way is to ask for the character bounding box, which
399 unfortunately is wrong in these cases).
401 It's not clear (to me at least), wether this is a bug in Xft,
402 freetype, or the respective font. If you encounter this problem you
403 might try using the "-lsp" option to give the font more height. If
404 that doesn't work, you might be forced to use a different font.
406 All of this is not a problem when using X11 core fonts, as their
407 bounding box data is correct.
409 On Solaris 9, many line-drawing characters are too wide.
410 Seems to be a known bug, read
411 <http://nixdoc.net/files/forum/about34198.html>. Some people use the
412 following ugly workaround to get non-double-wide-characters working:
414 #define wcwidth(x) wcwidth(x) > 1 ? 1 : wcwidth(x)
416 My Compose (Multi_key) key is no longer working.
417 The most common causes for this are that either your locale is not
418 set correctly, or you specified a preeditStyle that is not supported
419 by your input method. For example, if you specified OverTheSpot and
420 your input method (e.g. the default input method handling Compose
421 keys) does not support this (for instance because it is not visual),
422 then rxvt-unicode will continue without an input method.
424 In this case either do not specify a preeditStyle or specify more
425 than one pre-edit style, such as OverTheSpot,Root,None.
427 I cannot type "Ctrl-Shift-2" to get an ASCII NUL character due to ISO
429 Either try "Ctrl-2" alone (it often is mapped to ASCII NUL even on
430 international keyboards) or simply use ISO 14755 support to your
431 advantage, typing <Ctrl-Shift-0> to get a ASCII NUL. This works for
432 other codes, too, such as "Ctrl-Shift-1-d" to type the default
433 telnet escape character and so on.
435 How can I keep rxvt-unicode from using reverse video so much?
436 First of all, make sure you are running with the right terminal
437 settings ("TERM=rxvt-unicode"), which will get rid of most of these
438 effects. Then make sure you have specified colours for italic and
439 bold, as otherwise rxvt-unicode might use reverse video to simulate
445 Some programs assume totally weird colours (red instead of blue), how
447 For some unexplainable reason, some rare programs assume a very
448 weird colour palette when confronted with a terminal with more than
449 the standard 8 colours (rxvt-unicode supports 88). The right fix is,
450 of course, to fix these programs not to assume non-ISO colours
451 without very good reasons.
453 In the meantime, you can either edit your "rxvt-unicode" terminfo
454 definition to only claim 8 colour support or use "TERM=rxvt", which
455 will fix colours but keep you from using other rxvt-unicode
458 I am on FreeBSD and rxvt-unicode does not seem to work at all.
459 Rxvt-unicode requires the symbol "__STDC_ISO_10646__" to be defined
460 in your compile environment, or an implementation that implements
461 it, wether it defines the symbol or not. "__STDC_ISO_10646__"
462 requires that wchar_t is represented as unicode.
464 As you might have guessed, FreeBSD does neither define this symobl
465 nor does it support it. Instead, it uses it's own internal
466 representation of wchar_t. This is, of course, completely fine with
467 respect to standards.
469 However, that means rxvt-unicode only works in "POSIX", "ISO-8859-1"
470 and "UTF-8" locales under FreeBSD (which all use Unicode as wchar_t.
472 "__STDC_ISO_10646__" is the only sane way to support multi-language
473 apps in an OS, as using a locale-dependent (and non-standardized)
474 representation of wchar_t makes it impossible to convert between
475 wchar_t (as used by X11 and your applications) and any other
476 encoding without implementing OS-specific-wrappers for each and
477 every locale. There simply are no APIs to convert wchar_t into
478 anything except the current locale encoding.
480 Some applications (such as the formidable mlterm) work around this
481 by carrying their own replacement functions for character set
482 handling with them, and either implementing OS-dependent hacks or
483 doing multiple conversions (which is slow and unreliable in case the
484 OS implements encodings slightly different than the terminal
487 The rxvt-unicode author insists that the right way to fix this is in
488 the system libraries once and for all, instead of forcing every app
489 to carry complete replacements for them :)
491 I use Solaris 9 and it doesn't compile/work/etc.
492 Try the diff in doc/solaris9.patch as a base. It fixes the worst
493 problems with "wcwidth" and a compile problem.
495 How can I use rxvt-unicode under cygwin?
496 rxvt-unicode should compile and run out of the box on cygwin, using
497 the X11 libraries that come with cygwin. libW11 emulation is no
498 longer supported (and makes no sense, either, as it only supported a
499 single font). I recommend starting the X-server in "-multiwindow" or
500 "-rootless" mode instead, which will result in similar look&feel as
501 the old libW11 emulation.
503 At the time of this writing, cygwin didn't seem to support any
504 multi-byte encodings (you might try "LC_CTYPE=C-UTF-8"), so you are
505 likely limited to 8-bit encodings.
507 How does rxvt-unicode determine the encoding to use?
508 Is there an option to switch encodings?
509 Unlike some other terminals, rxvt-unicode has no encoding switch,
510 and no specific "utf-8" mode, such as xterm. In fact, it doesn't
511 even know about UTF-8 or any other encodings with respect to
514 The reasons is that there exists a perfectly fine mechanism for
515 selecting the encoding, doing I/O and (most important) communicating
516 this to all applications so everybody agrees on character properties
517 such as width and code number. This mechanism is the *locale*.
518 Applications not using that info will have problems (for example,
519 "xterm" gets the width of characters wrong as it uses it's own,
520 locale-independent table under all locales).
522 Rxvt-unicode uses the "LC_CTYPE" locale category to select encoding.
523 All programs doing the same (that is, most) will automatically agree
524 in the interpretation of characters.
526 Unfortunately, there is no system-independent way to select locales,
527 nor is there a standard on how locale specifiers will look like.
529 On most systems, the content of the "LC_CTYPE" environment variable
530 contains an arbitrary string which corresponds to an
531 already-installed locale. Common names for locales are
532 "en_US.UTF-8", "de_DE.ISO-8859-15", "ja_JP.EUC-JP", i.e.
533 "language_country.encoding", but other forms (i.e. "de" or "german")
536 Rxvt-unicode ignores all other locale categories, and except for the
537 encoding, ignores country or language-specific settings, i.e.
538 "de_DE.UTF-8" and "ja_JP.UTF-8" are the normally same to
541 If you want to use a specific encoding you have to make sure you
542 start rxvt-unicode with the correct "LC_CTYPE" category.
544 Can I switch locales at runtime?
545 Yes, using an escape sequence. Try something like this, which sets
546 rxvt-unicode's idea of "LC_CTYPE".
548 printf '\e]701;%s\007' ja_JP.SJIS
550 See also the previous answer.
552 Sometimes this capability is rather handy when you want to work in
553 one locale (e.g. "de_DE.UTF-8") but some programs don't support it
554 (e.g. UTF-8). For example, I use this script to start "xjdic", which
555 first switches to a locale supported by xjdic and back later:
557 printf '\e]701;%s\007' ja_JP.SJIS
559 printf '\e]701;%s\007' de_DE.UTF-8
561 You can also use xterm's "luit" program, which usually works fine,
562 except for some locales where character width differs between
563 program- and rxvt-unicode-locales.
565 Can I switch the fonts at runtime?
566 Yes, using an escape sequence. Try something like this, which has
567 the same effect as using the "-fn" switch, and takes effect
570 printf '\e]50;%s\007' "9x15bold,xft:Kochi Gothic"
572 This is useful if you e.g. work primarily with japanese (and prefer
573 a japanese font), but you have to switch to chinese temporarily,
574 where japanese fonts would only be in your way.
576 You can think of this as a kind of manual ISO-2022 switching.
578 Why do italic characters look as if clipped?
579 Many fonts have difficulties with italic characters and hinting. For
580 example, the otherwise very nicely hinted font "xft:Bitstream Vera
581 Sans Mono" completely fails in it's italic face. A workaround might
582 be to enable freetype autohinting, i.e. like this:
584 URxvt.italicFont: xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:italic:autohint=true
585 URxvt.boldItalicFont: xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:bold:italic:autohint=true
587 My input method wants <some encoding> but I want UTF-8, what can I do?
588 You can specify separate locales for the input method and the rest
589 of the terminal, using the resource "imlocale":
591 URxvt.imlocale: ja_JP.EUC-JP
593 Now you can start your terminal with "LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8" and
594 still use your input method. Please note, however, that you will not
595 be able to input characters outside "EUC-JP" in a normal way then,
596 as your input method limits you.
598 Rxvt-unicode crashes when the X Input Method changes or exits.
599 Unfortunately, this is unavoidable, as the XIM protocol is racy by
600 design. Applications can avoid some crashes at the expense of memory
601 leaks, and Input Methods can avoid some crashes by careful ordering
602 at exit time. kinput2 (and derived input methods) generally
603 succeeds, while SCIM (or similar input methods) fails. In the end,
604 however, crashes cannot be completely avoided even if both sides
607 So the only workaround is not to kill your Input Method Servers.
609 Rxvt-unicode uses gobs of memory, how can I reduce that?
610 Rxvt-unicode tries to obey the rule of not charging you for
611 something you don't use. One thing you should try is to configure
612 out all settings that you don't need, for example, Xft support is a
613 resource hog by design, when used. Compiling it out ensures that no
614 Xft font will be loaded accidentally when rxvt-unicode tries to find
615 a font for your characters.
617 Also, many people (me included) like large windows and even larger
618 scrollback buffers: Without "--enable-unicode3", rxvt-unicode will
619 use 6 bytes per screen cell. For a 160x?? window this amounts to
620 almost a kilobyte per line. A scrollback buffer of 10000 lines will
621 then (if full) use 10 Megabytes of memory. With "--enable-unicode3"
622 it gets worse, as rxvt-unicode then uses 8 bytes per screen cell.
624 Can I speed up Xft rendering somehow?
625 Yes, the most obvious way to speed it up is to avoid Xft entirely,
626 as it is simply slow. If you still want Xft fonts you might try to
627 disable antialiasing (by appending ":antialias=false"), which saves
628 lots of memory and also speeds up rendering considerably.
630 Rxvt-unicode doesn't seem to anti-alias its fonts, what is wrong?
631 Rxvt-unicode will use whatever you specify as a font. If it needs to
632 fall back to it's default font search list it will prefer X11 core
633 fonts, because they are small and fast, and then use Xft fonts. It
634 has antialiasing disabled for most of them, because the author
635 thinks they look best that way.
637 If you want antialiasing, you have to specify the fonts manually.
639 Mouse cut/paste suddenly no longer works.
640 Make sure that mouse reporting is actually turned off since killing
641 some editors prematurely may leave the mouse in mouse report mode.
642 I've heard that tcsh may use mouse reporting unless it otherwise
643 specified. A quick check is to see if cut/paste works when the Alt
644 or Shift keys are depressed.
646 What's with this bold/blink stuff?
647 If no bold colour is set via "colorBD:", bold will invert text using
648 the standard foreground colour.
650 For the standard background colour, blinking will actually make the
651 text blink when compiled with "--enable-blinking". with standard
652 colours. Without "--enable-blinking", the blink attribute will be
655 On ANSI colours, bold/blink attributes are used to set
656 high-intensity foreground/background colors.
658 color0-7 are the low-intensity colors.
660 color8-15 are the corresponding high-intensity colors.
662 I don't like the screen colors. How do I change them?
663 You can change the screen colors at run-time using ~/.Xdefaults
664 resources (or as long-options).
666 Here are values that are supposed to resemble a VGA screen,
667 including the murky brown that passes for low-intensity yellow:
669 URxvt.color0: #000000
670 URxvt.color1: #A80000
671 URxvt.color2: #00A800
672 URxvt.color3: #A8A800
673 URxvt.color4: #0000A8
674 URxvt.color5: #A800A8
675 URxvt.color6: #00A8A8
676 URxvt.color7: #A8A8A8
678 URxvt.color8: #000054
679 URxvt.color9: #FF0054
680 URxvt.color10: #00FF54
681 URxvt.color11: #FFFF54
682 URxvt.color12: #0000FF
683 URxvt.color13: #FF00FF
684 URxvt.color14: #00FFFF
685 URxvt.color15: #FFFFFF
687 And here is a more complete set of non-standard colors described
688 (not by me) as "pretty girly".
690 URxvt.cursorColor: #dc74d1
691 URxvt.pointerColor: #dc74d1
692 URxvt.background: #0e0e0e
693 URxvt.foreground: #4ad5e1
694 URxvt.color0: #000000
695 URxvt.color8: #8b8f93
696 URxvt.color1: #dc74d1
697 URxvt.color9: #dc74d1
698 URxvt.color2: #0eb8c7
699 URxvt.color10: #0eb8c7
700 URxvt.color3: #dfe37e
701 URxvt.color11: #dfe37e
702 URxvt.color5: #9e88f0
703 URxvt.color13: #9e88f0
704 URxvt.color6: #73f7ff
705 URxvt.color14: #73f7ff
706 URxvt.color7: #e1dddd
707 URxvt.color15: #e1dddd
709 How can I start rxvtd in a race-free way?
710 Try "rxvtd -f -o", which tells rxvtd to open the display, create the
711 listening socket and then fork.
713 What's with the strange Backspace/Delete key behaviour?
714 Assuming that the physical Backspace key corresponds to the
715 BackSpace keysym (not likely for Linux ... see the following
716 question) there are two standard values that can be used for
717 Backspace: "^H" and "^?".
719 Historically, either value is correct, but rxvt-unicode adopts the
720 debian policy of using "^?" when unsure, because it's the one only
721 only correct choice :).
723 Rxvt-unicode tries to inherit the current stty settings and uses the
724 value of `erase' to guess the value for backspace. If rxvt-unicode
725 wasn't started from a terminal (say, from a menu or by remote
726 shell), then the system value of `erase', which corresponds to
727 CERASE in <termios.h>, will be used (which may not be the same as
730 For starting a new rxvt-unicode:
740 Toggle with "ESC [ 36 h" / "ESC [ 36 l".
742 For an existing rxvt-unicode:
752 This helps satisfy some of the Backspace discrepancies that occur,
753 but if you use Backspace = "^H", make sure that the termcap/terminfo
754 value properly reflects that.
756 The Delete key is a another casualty of the ill-defined Backspace
757 problem. To avoid confusion between the Backspace and Delete keys,
758 the Delete key has been assigned an escape sequence to match the
759 vt100 for Execute ("ESC [ 3 ~") and is in the supplied
762 Some other Backspace problems:
764 some editors use termcap/terminfo, some editors (vim I'm told)
765 expect Backspace = ^H, GNU Emacs (and Emacs-like editors) use ^H for
768 Perhaps someday this will all be resolved in a consistent manner.
770 I don't like the key-bindings. How do I change them?
771 There are some compile-time selections available via configure.
772 Unless you have run "configure" with the "--disable-resources"
773 option you can use the `keysym' resource to alter the keystrings
774 associated with keysyms.
776 Here's an example for a URxvt session started using "rxvt -name
779 URxvt.keysym.Home: \033[1~
780 URxvt.keysym.End: \033[4~
781 URxvt.keysym.C-apostrophe: \033<C-'>
782 URxvt.keysym.C-slash: \033<C-/>
783 URxvt.keysym.C-semicolon: \033<C-;>
784 URxvt.keysym.C-grave: \033<C-`>
785 URxvt.keysym.C-comma: \033<C-,>
786 URxvt.keysym.C-period: \033<C-.>
787 URxvt.keysym.C-0x60: \033<C-`>
788 URxvt.keysym.C-Tab: \033<C-Tab>
789 URxvt.keysym.C-Return: \033<C-Return>
790 URxvt.keysym.S-Return: \033<S-Return>
791 URxvt.keysym.S-space: \033<S-Space>
792 URxvt.keysym.M-Up: \033<M-Up>
793 URxvt.keysym.M-Down: \033<M-Down>
794 URxvt.keysym.M-Left: \033<M-Left>
795 URxvt.keysym.M-Right: \033<M-Right>
796 URxvt.keysym.M-C-0: list \033<M-C- 0123456789 >
797 URxvt.keysym.M-C-a: list \033<M-C- abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz >
798 URxvt.keysym.F12: command:\033]701;zh_CN.GBK\007
800 See some more examples in the documentation for the keysym resource.
802 I'm using keyboard model XXX that has extra Prior/Next/Insert keys. How
803 do I make use of them? For example, the Sun Keyboard type 4 has the
804 following mappings that rxvt-unicode doesn't recognize.
812 Rather than have rxvt-unicode try to accommodate all the various
813 possible keyboard mappings, it is better to use `xmodmap' to remap
814 the keys as required for your particular machine.
816 How do I distinguish wether I'm running rxvt-unicode or a regular xterm?
817 I need this to decide about setting colors etc.
818 rxvt and rxvt-unicode always export the variable "COLORTERM", so you
819 can check and see if that is set. Note that several programs, JED,
820 slrn, Midnight Commander automatically check this variable to decide
821 whether or not to use color.
823 How do I set the correct, full IP address for the DISPLAY variable?
824 If you've compiled rxvt-unicode with DISPLAY_IS_IP and have enabled
825 insecure mode then it is possible to use the following shell script
826 snippets to correctly set the display. If your version of
827 rxvt-unicode wasn't also compiled with ESCZ_ANSWER (as assumed in
828 these snippets) then the COLORTERM variable can be used to
829 distinguish rxvt-unicode from a regular xterm.
831 Courtesy of Chuck Blake <cblake@BBN.COM> with the following shell
834 # Bourne/Korn/POSIX family of shells:
835 [ ${TERM:-foo} = foo ] && TERM=xterm # assume an xterm if we don't know
836 if [ ${TERM:-foo} = xterm ]; then
837 stty -icanon -echo min 0 time 15 # see if enhanced rxvt or not
841 if [ ""${term_id} = '^[[?1;2C' -a ${DISPLAY:-foo} = foo ]; then
842 echo -n '^[[7n' # query the rxvt we are in for the DISPLAY string
843 read DISPLAY # set it in our local shell
847 How do I compile the manual pages for myself?
848 You need to have a recent version of perl installed as
849 /usr/bin/perl, one that comes with pod2man, pod2text and pod2html.
850 Then go to the doc subdirectory and enter "make alldoc".
852 My question isn't answered here, can I ask a human?
853 Before sending me mail, you could go to IRC: "irc.freenode.net",
854 channel "#rxvt-unicode" has some rxvt-unicode enthusiasts that might
855 be interested in learning about new and exciting problems (but not
projects / dana / urxvt.git / blob