FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS How do I know which rxvt-unicode version I'm using? The version number is displayed with the usage (-h). Also the escape sequence "ESC [ 8 n" sets the window title to the version number. I am using Debian GNU/Linux and have a problem... The Debian GNU/Linux package of rxvt-unicode contains large patches that considerably change the behaviour of rxvt-unicode. Before reporting a bug to the original rxvt-unicode author please download and install the genuine version () and try to reproduce the problem. If you cannot, chances are that the problems are specific to Debian GNU/Linux, in which case it should be reported via the Debian Bug Tracking System (use "reportbug" to report the bug). For other problems that also affect the Debian package, you can and probably should use the Debian BTS, too, because, after all, it's also a bug in the Debian version and it serves as a reminder for other users that might encounter the same issue. When I log-in to another system it tells me about missing terminfo data? The terminal description used by rxvt-unicode is not as widely available as that for xterm, or even rxvt (for which the same problem often arises). The correct solution for this problem is to install the terminfo, this can be done like this (with ncurses' infocmp): REMOTE=remotesystem.domain infocmp rxvt-unicode | ssh $REMOTE "cat >/tmp/ti && tic /tmp/ti" ... or by installing rxvt-unicode normally on the remote system, If you cannot or do not want to do this, then you can simply set "TERM=rxvt" or even "TERM=xterm", and live with the small number of problems arising, which includes wrong keymapping, less and different colours and some refresh errors in fullscreen applications. It's a nice quick-and-dirty workaround for rare cases, though. If you always want to do this (and are fine with the consequences) you can either recompile rxvt-unicode with the desired TERM value or use a resource to set it: URxvt.termName: rxvt If you don't plan to use rxvt (quite common...) you could also replace the rxvt terminfo file with the rxvt-unicode one. "bash"'s readline does not work correctly under rxvt. I need a termcap file entry. One reason you might want this is that some distributions or operating systems still compile some programs using the long-obsoleted termcap (Fedora Core's bash is one example) and rely on a termcap entry for "rxvt-unicode". You could use rxvt's termcap entry with resonable results in many cases. You can also create a termcap entry by using terminfo's infocmp program like this: infocmp -C rxvt-unicode Or you could use this termcap entry, generated by the command above: rxvt-unicode|rxvt-unicode terminal (X Window System):\ :am:bw:eo:km:mi:ms:xn:xo:\ :co#80:it#8:li#24:\ :AL=\E[%dL:DC=\E[%dP:DL=\E[%dM:DO=\E[%dB:IC=\E[%d@:\ :K1=\EOw:K2=\EOu:K3=\EOy:K4=\EOq:K5=\EOs:LE=\E[%dD:\ :RI=\E[%dC:SF=\E[%dS:SR=\E[%dT:UP=\E[%dA:ae=^O:al=\E[L:\ :as=^N:bl=^G:cd=\E[J:ce=\E[K:cl=\E[H\E[2J:cm=\E[%i%d;%dH:\ :cr=^M:cs=\E[%i%d;%dr:ct=\E[3g:dc=\E[P:dl=\E[M:do=^J:\ :ec=\E[%dX:ei=\E[4l:ho=\E[H:i1=\E[?47l\E=\E[?1l:ic=\E[@:\ :im=\E[4h:is=\E[r\E[m\E[2J\E[H\E[?7h\E[?1;3;4;6l\E[4l:\ :k0=\E[21~:k1=\E[11~:k2=\E[12~:k3=\E[13~:k4=\E[14~:\ :k5=\E[15~:k6=\E[17~:k7=\E[18~:k8=\E[19~:k9=\E[20~:\ :kD=\E[3~:kI=\E[2~:kN=\E[6~:kP=\E[5~:kb=\177:kd=\EOB:\ :ke=\E[?1l\E>:kh=\E[7~:kl=\EOD:kr=\EOC:ks=\E[?1h\E=:\ :ku=\EOA:le=^H:mb=\E[5m:md=\E[1m:me=\E[m\017:mr=\E[7m:\ :nd=\E[C:rc=\E8:sc=\E7:se=\E[27m:sf=^J:so=\E[7m:sr=\EM:\ :st=\EH:ta=^I:te=\E[r\E[?1049l:ti=\E[?1049h:ue=\E[24m:\ :up=\E[A:us=\E[4m:vb=\E[?5h\E[?5l:ve=\E[?25h:vi=\E[?25l:\ :vs=\E[?25h: Why does "ls" no longer have coloured output? The "ls" in the GNU coreutils unfortunately doesn't use terminfo to decide wether a terminal has colour, but uses it's own configuration file. Needless to say, "rxvt-unicode" is not in it's default file (among with most other terminals supporting colour). Either add: TERM rxvt-unicode to "/etc/DIR_COLORS" or simply add: alias ls='ls --color=auto' to your ".profile" or ".bashrc". Why doesn't vim/emacs etc. use the 88 colour mode? Why doesn't vim/emacs etc. make use of italic? Why are the secondary screen-related options not working properly? Make sure you are using "TERM=rxvt-unicode". Some pre-packaged distributions (most notably Debian GNU/Linux) break rxvt-unicode by setting "TERM" to "rxvt", which doesn't have these extra features. Unfortunately, some of these (most notably, again, Debian GNU/Linux) furthermore fail to even install the "rxvt-unicode" terminfo file, so you will need to install it on your own (See the question When I log-in to another system it tells me about missing terminfo data? on how to do this). My numerical keypad acts weird and generates differing output? Some Debian GNUL/Linux users seem to have this problem, although no specific details were reported so far. It is possible that this is caused by the wrong "TERM" setting, although the details of wether and how this can happen are unknown, as "TERM=rxvt" should offer a compatible keymap. See the answer to the previous question, and please report if that helped. Rxvt-unicode does not seem to understand the selected encoding? Unicode does not seem to work? If you encounter strange problems like typing an accented character but getting two unrelated other characters or similar, or if program output is subtly garbled, then you should check your locale settings. Rxvt-unicode must be started with the same "LC_CTYPE" setting as the programs. Often rxvt-unicode is started in the "C" locale, while the login script running within the rxvt-unicode window changes the locale to something else, e.g. "en_GB.UTF-8". Needless to say, this is not going to work. The best thing is to fix your startup environment, as you will likely run into other problems. If nothing works you can try this in your .profile. printf '\e]701;%s\007' "$LC_CTYPE" If this doesn't work, then maybe you use a "LC_CTYPE" specification not supported on your systems. Some systems have a "locale" command which displays this (also, "perl -e0" can be used to check locale settings, as it will complain loudly if it cannot set the locale). If it displays something like: locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: ... Then the locale you specified is not supported on your system. If nothing works and you are sure that everything is set correctly then you will need to remember a little known fact: Some programs just don't support locales :( Why do some characters look so much different than others? How does rxvt-unicode choose fonts? Most fonts do not contain the full range of Unicode, which is fine. Chances are that the font you (or the admin/package maintainer of your system/os) have specified does not cover all the characters you want to display. rxvt-unicode makes a best-effort try at finding a replacement font. Often the result is fine, but sometimes the chosen font looks bad/ugly/wrong. Some fonts have totally strange characters that don't resemble the correct glyph at all, and rxvt-unicode lacks the artificial intelligence to detect that a specific glyph is wrong: it has to believe the font that the characters it claims to contain indeed look correct. In that case, select a font of your taste and add it to the font list, e.g.: rxvt -fn basefont,font2,font3... When rxvt-unicode sees a character, it will first look at the base font. If the base font does not contain the character, it will go to the next font, and so on. Specifying your own fonts will also speed up this search and use less resources within rxvt-unicode and the X-server. The only limitation is that none of the fonts may be larger than the base font, as the base font defines the terminal character cell size, which must be the same due to the way terminals work. Why do some chinese characters look so different than others? This is because there is a difference between script and language -- rxvt-unicode does not know which language the text that is output is, as it only knows the unicode character codes. If rxvt-unicode first sees a japanese/chinese character, it might choose a japanese font for display. Subsequent japanese characters will use that font. Now, many chinese characters aren't represented in japanese fonts, so when the first non-japanese character comes up, rxvt-unicode will look for a chinese font -- unfortunately at this point, it will still use the japanese font for chinese characters that are also in the japanese font. The workaround is easy: just tag a chinese font at the end of your font list (see the previous question). The key is to view the font list as a preference list: If you expect more japanese, list a japanese font first. If you expect more chinese, put a chinese font first. In the future it might be possible to switch language preferences at runtime (the internal data structure has no problem with using different fonts for the same character at the same time, but no interface for this has been designed yet). Until then, you might get away with switching fonts at runtime (see "Can I switch the fonts at runtime?" later in this document). Why does rxvt-unicode sometimes leave pixel droppings? Most fonts were not designed for terminal use, which means that character size varies a lot. A font that is otherwise fine for terminal use might contain some characters that are simply too wide. Rxvt-unicode will avoid these characters. For characters that are just "a bit" too wide a special "careful" rendering mode is used that redraws adjacent characters. All of this requires that fonts do not lie about character sizes, however: Xft fonts often draw glyphs larger than their acclaimed bounding box, and rxvt-unicode has no way of detecting this (the correct way is to ask for the character bounding box, which unfortunately is wrong in these cases). It's not clear (to me at least), wether this is a bug in Xft, freetype, or the respective font. If you encounter this problem you might try using the "-lsp" option to give the font more height. If that doesn't work, you might be forced to use a different font. All of this is not a problem when using X11 core fonts, as their bounding box data is correct. My Compose (Multi_key) key is no longer working. The most common causes for this are that either your locale is not set correctly, or you specified a preeditStyle that is not supported by your input method. For example, if you specified OverTheSpot and your input method (e.g. the default input method handling Compose keys) does not support this (for instance because it is not visual), then rxvt-unicode will continue without an input method. In this case either do not specify a preeditStyle or specify more than one pre-edit style, such as OverTheSpot,Root,None. I cannot type "Ctrl-Shift-2" to get an ASCII NUL character due to ISO 14755 Either try "Ctrl-2" alone (it often is mapped to ASCII NUL even on international keyboards) or simply use ISO 14755 support to your advantage, typing to get a ASCII NUL. This works for other codes, too, such as "Ctrl-Shift-1-d" to type the default telnet escape character and so on. How can I keep rxvt-unicode from using reverse video so much? First of all, make sure you are running with the right terminal settings ("TERM=rxvt-unicode"), which will get rid of most of these effects. Then make sure you have specified colours for italic and bold, as otherwise rxvt-unicode might use reverse video to simulate the effect: URxvt.colorBD: white URxvt.colorIT: green Some programs assume totally weird colours (red instead of blue), how can I fix that? For some unexplainable reason, some rare programs assume a very weird colour palette when confronted with a terminal with more than the standard 8 colours (rxvt-unicode supports 88). The right fix is, of course, to fix these programs not to assume non-ISO colours without very good reasons. In the meantime, you can either edit your "rxvt-unicode" terminfo definition to only claim 8 colour support or use "TERM=rxvt", which will fix colours but keep you from using other rxvt-unicode features. I am on FreeBSD and rxvt-unicode does not seem to work at all. Rxvt-unicode requires the symbol "__STDC_ISO_10646__" to be defined in your compile environment, or an implementation that implements it, wether it defines the symbol or not. "__STDC_ISO_10646__" requires that wchar_t is represented as unicode. As you might have guessed, FreeBSD does neither define this symobl nor does it support it. Instead, it uses it's own internal representation of wchar_t. This is, of course, completely fine with respect to standards. However, "__STDC_ISO_10646__" is the only sane way to support multi-language apps in an OS, as using a locale-dependent (and non-standardized) representation of wchar_t makes it impossible to convert between wchar_t (as used by X11 and your applications) and any other encoding without implementing OS-specific-wrappers for each and every locale. There simply are no APIs to convert wchar_t into anything except the current locale encoding. Some applications (such as the formidable mlterm) work around this by carrying their own replacement functions for character set handling with them, and either implementing OS-dependent hacks or doing multiple conversions (which is slow and unreliable in case the OS implements encodings slightly different than the terminal emulator). The rxvt-unicode author insists that the right way to fix this is in the system libraries once and for all, instead of forcing every app to carry complete replacements for them :) How does rxvt-unicode determine the encoding to use? Is there an option to switch encodings? Unlike some other terminals, rxvt-unicode has no encoding switch, and no specific "utf-8" mode, such as xterm. In fact, it doesn't even know about UTF-8 or any other encodings with respect to terminal I/O. The reasons is that there exists a perfectly fine mechanism for selecting the encoding, doing I/O and (most important) communicating this to all applications so everybody agrees on character properties such as width and code number. This mechanism is the *locale*. Applications not using that info will have problems (for example, "xterm" gets the width of characters wrong as it uses it's own, locale-independent table under all locales). Rxvt-unicode uses the "LC_CTYPE" locale category to select encoding. All programs doing the same (that is, most) will automatically agree in the interpretation of characters. Unfortunately, there is no system-independent way to select locales, nor is there a standard on how locale specifiers will look like. On most systems, the content of the "LC_CTYPE" environment variable contains an arbitrary string which corresponds to an already-installed locale. Common names for locales are "en_US.UTF-8", "de_DE.ISO-8859-15", "ja_JP.EUC-JP", i.e. "language_country.encoding", but other forms (i.e. "de" or "german") are also common. Rxvt-unicode ignores all other locale categories, and except for the encoding, ignores country or language-specific settings, i.e. "de_DE.UTF-8" and "ja_JP.UTF-8" are the normally same to rxvt-unicode. If you want to use a specific encoding you have to make sure you start rxvt-unicode with the correct "LC_CTYPE" category. Can I switch locales at runtime? Yes, using an escape sequence. Try something like this, which sets rxvt-unicode's idea of "LC_CTYPE". printf '\e]701;%s\007' ja_JP.SJIS See also the previous answer. Sometimes this capability is rather handy when you want to work in one locale (e.g. "de_DE.UTF-8") but some programs don't support it (e.g. UTF-8). For example, I use this script to start "xjdic", which first switches to a locale supported by xjdic and back later: printf '\e]701;%s\007' ja_JP.SJIS xjdic -js printf '\e]701;%s\007' de_DE.UTF-8 You can also use xterm's "luit" program, which usually works fine, except for some locales where character width differs between program- and rxvt-unicode-locales. Can I switch the fonts at runtime? Yes, using an escape sequence. Try something like this, which has the same effect as using the "-fn" switch, and takes effect immediately: printf '\e]50;%s\007' "9x15bold,xft:Kochi Gothic" This is useful if you e.g. work primarily with japanese (and prefer a japanese font), but you have to switch to chinese temporarily, where japanese fonts would only be in your way. You can think of this as a kind of manual ISO-2022 switching. Why do italic characters look as if clipped? Many fonts have difficulties with italic characters and hinting. For example, the otherwise very nicely hinted font "xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono" completely fails in it's italic face. A workaround might be to enable freetype autohinting, i.e. like this: URxvt.italicFont: xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:italic:autohint=true URxvt.boldItalicFont: xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:bold:italic:autohint=true My input method wants but I want UTF-8, what can I do? You can specify separate locales for the input method and the rest of the terminal, using the resource "imlocale": URxvt*imlocale: ja_JP.EUC-JP Now you can start your terminal with "LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8" and still use your input method. Please note, however, that you will not be able to input characters outside "EUC-JP" in a normal way then, as your input method limits you. Rxvt-unicode uses gobs of memory, how can I reduce that? Rxvt-unicode tries to obey the rule of not charging you for something you don't use. One thing you should try is to configure out all settings that you don't need, for example, Xft support is a resource hog by design, when used. Compiling it out ensures that no Xft font will be loaded accidentally when rxvt-unicode tries to find a font for your characters. Also, many people (me included) like large windows and even larger scrollback buffers: Without "--enable-unicode3", rxvt-unicode will use 6 bytes per screen cell. For a 160x?? window this amounts to almost a kilobyte per line. A scrollback buffer of 10000 lines will then (if full) use 10 Megabytes of memory. With "--enable-unicode3" it gets worse, as rxvt-unicode then uses 8 bytes per screen cell. Can I speed up Xft rendering somehow? Yes, the most obvious way to speed it up is to avoid Xft entirely, as it is simply slow. If you still want Xft fonts you might try to disable antialiasing (by appending ":antialiasing=false"), which saves lots of memory and also speeds up rendering considerably. Rxvt-unicode doesn't seem to anti-alias its fonts, what is wrong? Rxvt-unicode will use whatever you specify as a font. If it needs to fall back to it's default font search list it will prefer X11 core fonts, because they are small and fast, and then use Xft fonts. It has antialiasing disabled for most of them, because the author thinks they look best that way. If you want antialiasing, you have to specify the fonts manually. Mouse cut/paste suddenly no longer works. Make sure that mouse reporting is actually turned off since killing some editors prematurely may leave the mouse in mouse report mode. I've heard that tcsh may use mouse reporting unless it otherwise specified. A quick check is to see if cut/paste works when the Alt or Shift keys are depressed. See rxvt(7) What's with this bold/blink stuff? If no bold colour is set via "colorBD:", bold will invert text using the standard foreground colour. For the standard background colour, blinking will actually make the text blink when compiled with "--enable-blinking". with standard colours. Without "--enable-blinking", the blink attribute will be ignored. On ANSI colours, bold/blink attributes are used to set high-intensity foreground/background colors. color0-7 are the low-intensity colors. color8-15 are the corresponding high-intensity colors. I don't like the screen colors. How do I change them? You can change the screen colors at run-time using ~/.Xdefaults resources (or as long-options). Here are values that are supposed to resemble a VGA screen, including the murky brown that passes for low-intensity yellow: URxvt.color0: #000000 URxvt.color1: #A80000 URxvt.color2: #00A800 URxvt.color3: #A8A800 URxvt.color4: #0000A8 URxvt.color5: #A800A8 URxvt.color6: #00A8A8 URxvt.color7: #A8A8A8 URxvt.color8: #000054 URxvt.color9: #FF0054 URxvt.color10: #00FF54 URxvt.color11: #FFFF54 URxvt.color12: #0000FF URxvt.color13: #FF00FF URxvt.color14: #00FFFF URxvt.color15: #FFFFFF And here is a more complete set of non-standard colors described (not by me) as "pretty girly". URxvt.cursorColor: #dc74d1 URxvt.pointerColor: #dc74d1 URxvt.background: #0e0e0e URxvt.foreground: #4ad5e1 URxvt.color0: #000000 URxvt.color8: #8b8f93 URxvt.color1: #dc74d1 URxvt.color9: #dc74d1 URxvt.color2: #0eb8c7 URxvt.color10: #0eb8c7 URxvt.color3: #dfe37e URxvt.color11: #dfe37e URxvt.color5: #9e88f0 URxvt.color13: #9e88f0 URxvt.color6: #73f7ff URxvt.color14: #73f7ff URxvt.color7: #e1dddd URxvt.color15: #e1dddd How can I start rxvtd in a race-free way? Despite it's name, rxvtd is not a real daemon, but more like a server that answers rxvtc's requests, so it doesn't background itself. To ensure rxvtd is listening on it's socket, you can use the following method to wait for the startup message before continuing: { rxvtd & } | read What's with the strange Backspace/Delete key behaviour? Assuming that the physical Backspace key corresponds to the BackSpace keysym (not likely for Linux ... see the following question) there are two standard values that can be used for Backspace: "^H" and "^?". Historically, either value is correct, but rxvt-unicode adopts the debian policy of using "^?" when unsure, because it's the one only only correct choice :). Rxvt-unicode tries to inherit the current stty settings and uses the value of `erase' to guess the value for backspace. If rxvt-unicode wasn't started from a terminal (say, from a menu or by remote shell), then the system value of `erase', which corresponds to CERASE in , will be used (which may not be the same as your stty setting). For starting a new rxvt-unicode: # use Backspace = ^H $ stty erase ^H $ rxvt # use Backspace = ^? $ stty erase ^? $ rxvt Toggle with "ESC [ 36 h" / "ESC [ 36 l" as documented in rxvt(7). For an existing rxvt-unicode: # use Backspace = ^H $ stty erase ^H $ echo -n "^[[36h" # use Backspace = ^? $ stty erase ^? $ echo -n "^[[36l" This helps satisfy some of the Backspace discrepancies that occur, but if you use Backspace = "^H", make sure that the termcap/terminfo value properly reflects that. The Delete key is a another casualty of the ill-defined Backspace problem. To avoid confusion between the Backspace and Delete keys, the Delete key has been assigned an escape sequence to match the vt100 for Execute ("ESC [ 3 ~") and is in the supplied termcap/terminfo. Some other Backspace problems: some editors use termcap/terminfo, some editors (vim I'm told) expect Backspace = ^H, GNU Emacs (and Emacs-like editors) use ^H for help. Perhaps someday this will all be resolved in a consistent manner. I don't like the key-bindings. How do I change them? There are some compile-time selections available via configure. Unless you have run "configure" with the "--disable-resources" option you can use the `keysym' resource to alter the keystrings associated with keysyms. Here's an example for a URxvt session started using "rxvt -name URxvt" URxvt.keysym.Home: \033[1~ URxvt.keysym.End: \033[4~ URxvt.keysym.C-apostrophe: \033 URxvt.keysym.C-slash: \033 URxvt.keysym.C-semicolon: \033 URxvt.keysym.C-grave: \033 URxvt.keysym.C-comma: \033 URxvt.keysym.C-period: \033 URxvt.keysym.C-0x60: \033 URxvt.keysym.C-Tab: \033 URxvt.keysym.C-Return: \033 URxvt.keysym.S-Return: \033 URxvt.keysym.S-space: \033 URxvt.keysym.M-Up: \033 URxvt.keysym.M-Down: \033 URxvt.keysym.M-Left: \033 URxvt.keysym.M-Right: \033 URxvt.keysym.M-C-0: list \033 URxvt.keysym.M-C-a: list \033 URxvt.keysym.F12: command:\033]701;zh_CN.GBK\007 See some more examples in the documentation for the keysym resource. I'm using keyboard model XXX that has extra Prior/Next/Insert keys. How do I make use of them? For example, the Sun Keyboard type 4 has the following mappings that rxvt-unicode doesn't recognize. KP_Insert == Insert F22 == Print F27 == Home F29 == Prior F33 == End F35 == Next Rather than have rxvt-unicode try to accommodate all the various possible keyboard mappings, it is better to use `xmodmap' to remap the keys as required for your particular machine. How do I distinguish wether I'm running rxvt-unicode or a regular xterm? I need this to decide about setting colors etc. rxvt and rxvt-unicode always export the variable "COLORTERM", so you can check and see if that is set. Note that several programs, JED, slrn, Midnight Commander automatically check this variable to decide whether or not to use color. How do I set the correct, full IP address for the DISPLAY variable? If you've compiled rxvt-unicode with DISPLAY_IS_IP and have enabled insecure mode then it is possible to use the following shell script snippets to correctly set the display. If your version of rxvt-unicode wasn't also compiled with ESCZ_ANSWER (as assumed in these snippets) then the COLORTERM variable can be used to distinguish rxvt-unicode from a regular xterm. Courtesy of Chuck Blake with the following shell script snippets: # Bourne/Korn/POSIX family of shells: [ ${TERM:-foo} = foo ] && TERM=xterm # assume an xterm if we don't know if [ ${TERM:-foo} = xterm ]; then stty -icanon -echo min 0 time 15 # see if enhanced rxvt or not echo -n '^[Z' read term_id stty icanon echo if [ ""${term_id} = '^[[?1;2C' -a ${DISPLAY:-foo} = foo ]; then echo -n '^[[7n' # query the rxvt we are in for the DISPLAY string read DISPLAY # set it in our local shell fi fi How do I compile the manual pages for myself? You need to have a recent version of perl installed as /usr/bin/perl, one that comes with pod2man, pod2text and pod2html. Then go to the doc subdirectory and enter "make alldoc". My question isn't answered here, can I ask a human? Before sending me mail, you could go to IRC: "irc.freenode.net", channel "#rxvt-unicode" has some rxvt-unicode enthusiasts that might be interested in learning about new and exciting problems (but not FAQs :).