-FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
- Meta, Features & Commandline Issues
- 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 :).
-
- Does it support tabs, can I have a tabbed rxvt-unicode?
- Beginning with version 7.3, there is a perl extension that implements a
- simple tabbed terminal. It is installed by default, so any of these
- should give you tabs:
-
- urxvt -pe tabbed
-
- URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,tabbed
-
- It will also work fine with tabbing functionality of many window
- managers or similar tabbing programs, and its embedding-features allow
- it to be embedded into other programs, as witnessed by doc/rxvt-tabbed
- or the upcoming "Gtk2::URxvt" perl module, which features a tabbed urxvt
- (murxvt) terminal as an example embedding application.
-
- 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. When
- using the urxvtc client, the version displayed is that of the daemon.
-
- 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.
-
- How can I start urxvtd in a race-free way?
- Try "urxvtd -f -o", which tells urxvtd to open the display, create the
- listening socket and then fork.
-
- 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 <cblake@BBN.COM> 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 on my own?
- 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".
-
- Isn't rxvt-unicode supposed to be small? Don't all those features bloat?
- I often get asked about this, and I think, no, they didn't cause extra
- bloat. If you compare a minimal rxvt and a minimal urxvt, you can see
- that the urxvt binary is larger (due to some encoding tables always
- being compiled in), but it actually uses less memory (RSS) after
- startup. Even with "--disable-everything", this comparison is a bit
- unfair, as many features unique to urxvt (locale, encoding conversion,
- iso14755 etc.) are already in use in this mode.
-
- text data bss drs rss filename
- 98398 1664 24 15695 1824 rxvt --disable-everything
- 188985 9048 66616 18222 1788 urxvt --disable-everything
-
- When you "--enable-everything" (which _is_ unfair, as this involves xft
- and full locale/XIM support which are quite bloaty inside libX11 and my
- libc), the two diverge, but not unreasnobaly so.
-
- text data bss drs rss filename
- 163431 2152 24 20123 2060 rxvt --enable-everything
- 1035683 49680 66648 29096 3680 urxvt --enable-everything
-
- The very large size of the text section is explained by the east-asian
- encoding tables, which, if unused, take up disk space but nothing else
- and can be compiled out unless you rely on X11 core fonts that use those
- encodings. The BSS size comes from the 64k emergency buffer that my c++
- compiler allocates (but of course doesn't use unless you are out of
- memory). Also, using an xft font instead of a core font immediately adds
- a few megabytes of RSS. Xft indeed is responsible for a lot of RSS even
- when not used.
-
- Of course, due to every character using two or four bytes instead of
- one, a large scrollback buffer will ultimately make rxvt-unicode use
- more memory.
-
- Compared to e.g. Eterm (5112k), aterm (3132k) and xterm (4680k), this
- still fares rather well. And compared to some monsters like
- gnome-terminal (21152k + extra 4204k in separate processes) or konsole
- (22200k + extra 43180k in daemons that stay around after exit, plus half
- a minute of startup time, including the hundreds of warnings it spits
- out), it fares extremely well *g*.
-
- Why C++, isn't that unportable/bloated/uncool?
- Is this a question? :) It comes up very often. The simple answer is: I
- had to write it, and C++ allowed me to write and maintain it in a
- fraction of the time and effort (which is a scarce resource for me). Put
- even shorter: It simply wouldn't exist without C++.
-
- My personal stance on this is that C++ is less portable than C, but in
- the case of rxvt-unicode this hardly matters, as its portability limits
- are defined by things like X11, pseudo terminals, locale support and
- unix domain sockets, which are all less portable than C++ itself.
-
- Regarding the bloat, see the above question: It's easy to write programs
- in C that use gobs of memory, an certainly possible to write programs in
- C++ that don't. C++ also often comes with large libraries, but this is
- not necessarily the case with GCC. Here is what rxvt links against on my
- system with a minimal config:
-
- libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x00002aaaaabc3000)
- libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00002aaaaadde000)
- libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00002aaaab01d000)
- /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00002aaaaaaab000)
-
- And here is rxvt-unicode:
-
- libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x00002aaaaabc3000)
- libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00002aaaaada2000)
- libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00002aaaaaeb0000)
- libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00002aaaab0ee000)
- /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00002aaaaaaab000)
-
- No large bloated libraries (of course, none were linked in statically),
- except maybe libX11 :)
-
- Rendering, Font & Look and Feel Issues
- I can't get transparency working, what am I doing wrong?
- First of all, transparency isn't officially supported in rxvt-unicode,
- so you are mostly on your own. Do not bug the author about it (but you
- may bug everybody else). Also, if you can't get it working consider it a
- rite of passage: ... and you failed.
-
- Here are four ways to get transparency. Do read the manpage and option
- descriptions for the programs mentioned and rxvt-unicode. Really, do it!
-
- 1. Use inheritPixmap:
-
- Esetroot wallpaper.jpg
- urxvt -ip -tint red -sh 40
-
- That works. If you think it doesn't, you lack transparency and tinting
- support, or you are unable to read.
-
- 2. Use a simple pixmap and emulate pseudo-transparency. This enables you
- to use effects other than tinting and shading: Just shade/tint/whatever
- your picture with gimp or any other tool:
-
- convert wallpaper.jpg -blur 20x20 -modulate 30 background.xpm
- urxvt -pixmap background.xpm -pe automove-background
-
- That works. If you think it doesn't, you lack XPM and Perl support, or
- you are unable to read.
-
- 3. Use an ARGB visual:
-
- urxvt -depth 32 -fg grey90 -bg rgba:0000/0000/4444/cccc
-
- This requires XFT support, and the support of your X-server. If that
- doesn't work for you, blame Xorg and Keith Packard. ARGB visuals aren't
- there yet, no matter what they claim. Rxvt-Unicode contains the
- neccessary bugfixes and workarounds for Xft and Xlib to make it work,
- but that doesn't mean that your WM has the required kludges in place.
-
- 4. Use xcompmgr and let it do the job:
-
- xprop -frame -f _NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY 32c \
- -set _NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY 0xc0000000
-
- Then click on a window you want to make transparent. Replace 0xc0000000
- by other values to change the degree of opacity. If it doesn't work and
- your server crashes, you got to keep the pieces.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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
-
- 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 ":antialias=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.
-
- 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
-
- Why do some characters look so much different than others?
- See next entry.
-
- 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.:
-
- urxvt -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.
-
- Keyboard, Mouse & User Interaction
- The new selection selects pieces that are too big, how can I select single words?
- If you want to select e.g. alphanumeric words, you can use the following
- setting:
-
- URxvt.selection.pattern-0: ([[:word:]]+)
-
- If you click more than twice, the selection will be extended more and
- more.
-
- To get a selection that is very similar to the old code, try this
- pattern:
-
- URxvt.selection.pattern-0: ([^"&'()*,;<=>?@[\\\\]^`{|})]+)
-
- Please also note that the *LeftClick Shift-LeftClik* combination also
- selects words like the old code.
-
- I don't like the new selection/popups/hotkeys/perl, how do I change/disable it?
- You can disable the perl extension completely by setting the
- perl-ext-common resource to the empty string, which also keeps
- rxvt-unicode from initialising perl, saving memory.
-
- If you only want to disable specific features, you first have to
- identify which perl extension is responsible. For this, read the section
- PREPACKAGED EXTENSIONS in the urxvtperl(3) manpage. For example, to
- disable the selection-popup and option-popup, specify this
- perl-ext-common resource:
-
- URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,-selection-popup,-option-popup
-
- This will keep the default extensions, but disable the two popup
- extensions. Some extensions can also be configured, for example,
- scrollback search mode is triggered by M-s. You can move it to any other
- combination either by setting the searchable-scrollback resource:
-
- URxvt.searchable-scrollback: CM-s
-
- The cursor moves when selecting text in the current input line, how do I switch this off?
- See next entry.
-
- During rlogin/ssh/telnet/etc. sessions, clicking near the cursor outputs strange escape sequences, how do I fix this?
- These are caused by the "readline" perl extension. Under normal
- circumstances, it will move your cursor around when you click into the
- line that contains it. It tries hard not to do this at the wrong moment,
- but when running a program that doesn't parse cursor movements or in
- some cases during rlogin sessions, it fails to detect this properly.
-
- You can permamently switch this feature off by disabling the "readline"
- extension:
-
- URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,-readline
-
- 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.
-
- 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 <Ctrl-Shift-0> 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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
- <termios.h>, 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
- $ urxvt
-
- # use Backspace = ^?
- $ stty erase ^?
- $ urxvt
-
- Toggle with "ESC [ 36 h" / "ESC [ 36 l".
-
- 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 "urxvt -name URxvt"
-
- URxvt.keysym.Home: \033[1~
- URxvt.keysym.End: \033[4~
- URxvt.keysym.C-apostrophe: \033<C-'>
- URxvt.keysym.C-slash: \033<C-/>
- URxvt.keysym.C-semicolon: \033<C-;>
- URxvt.keysym.C-grave: \033<C-`>
- URxvt.keysym.C-comma: \033<C-,>
- URxvt.keysym.C-period: \033<C-.>
- URxvt.keysym.C-0x60: \033<C-`>
- URxvt.keysym.C-Tab: \033<C-Tab>
- URxvt.keysym.C-Return: \033<C-Return>
- URxvt.keysym.S-Return: \033<S-Return>
- URxvt.keysym.S-space: \033<S-Space>
- URxvt.keysym.M-Up: \033<M-Up>
- URxvt.keysym.M-Down: \033<M-Down>
- URxvt.keysym.M-Left: \033<M-Left>
- URxvt.keysym.M-Right: \033<M-Right>
- URxvt.keysym.M-C-0: list \033<M-C- 0123456789 >
- URxvt.keysym.M-C-a: list \033<M-C- abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz >
- 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 map
- 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.
-
- Terminal Configuration
- Why doesn't rxvt-unicode read my resources?
- Well, why, indeed? It does, in a way very similar to other X
- applications. Most importantly, this means that if you or your OS loads
- resources into the X display (the right way to do it), rxvt-unicode will
- ignore any resource files in your home directory. It will only read
- $HOME/.Xdefaults when no resources are attached to the display.
-
- If you have or use an $HOME/.Xresources file, chances are that resources
- are loaded into your X-server. In this case, you have to re-login after
- every change (or run xrdb -merge $HOME/.Xresources).
-
- Also consider the form resources have to use:
-
- URxvt.resource: value
-
- If you want to use another form (there are lots of different ways of
- specifying resources), make sure you understand wether and why it works.
- If unsure, use the form above.
-
- 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.
-
- "tic" outputs some error when compiling the terminfo entry.
- Most likely it's the empty definition for "enacs=". Just replace it by
- "enacs=\E[0@" and try again.
-
- "bash"'s readline does not work correctly under urxvt.
- See next entry.
-
- 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
- library (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:lm#0:\
- :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=\E(B:al=\E[L:\
- :as=\E(0: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:\
- :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?
- See next entry.
-
- Why doesn't vim/emacs etc. make use of italic?
- See next entry.
-
- 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).
-
- Encoding / Locale / Input Method Issues
- Rxvt-unicode does not seem to understand the selected encoding?
- See next entry.
-
- 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 :(
-
- How does rxvt-unicode determine the encoding to use?
- See next entry.
-
- 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.
-
- My input method wants <some encoding> 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 crashes when the X Input Method changes or exits.
- Unfortunately, this is unavoidable, as the XIM protocol is racy by
- design. Applications can avoid some crashes at the expense of memory
- leaks, and Input Methods can avoid some crashes by careful ordering at
- exit time. kinput2 (and derived input methods) generally succeeds, while
- SCIM (or similar input methods) fails. In the end, however, crashes
- cannot be completely avoided even if both sides cooperate.
-
- So the only workaround is not to kill your Input Method Servers.
-
- Operating Systems / Package Maintaining
- I am using Debian GNU/Linux and have a problem...
- The Debian GNU/Linux package of rxvt-unicode in sarge contains large
- patches that considerably change the behaviour of rxvt-unicode (but
- unfortunately this notice has been removed). Before reporting a bug to
- the original rxvt-unicode author please download and install the genuine
- version (<http://software.schmorp.de#rxvt-unicode>) 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.
-
- I am maintaining rxvt-unicode for distribution/OS XXX, any recommendation?
- You should build one binary with the default options. configure now
- enables most useful options, and the trend goes to making them
- runtime-switchable, too, so there is usually no drawback to enbaling
- them, except higher disk and possibly memory usage. The perl interpreter
- should be enabled, as important functionality (menus, selection, likely
- more in the future) depends on it.
-
- You should not overwrite the "perl-ext-common" snd "perl-ext" resources
- system-wide (except maybe with "defaults"). This will result in useful
- behaviour. If your distribution aims at low memory, add an empty
- "perl-ext-common" resource to the app-defaults file. This will keep the
- perl interpreter disabled until the user enables it.
-
- If you can/want build more binaries, I recommend building a minimal one
- with "--disable-everything" (very useful) and a maximal one with
- "--enable-everything" (less useful, it will be very big due to a lot of
- encodings built-in that increase download times and are rarely used).
-
- I need to make it setuid/setgid to support utmp/ptys on my OS, is this safe?
- It should be, starting with release 7.1. You are encouraged to properly
- install urxvt with privileges necessary for your OS now.
-
- When rxvt-unicode detects that it runs setuid or setgid, it will fork
- into a helper process for privileged operations (pty handling on some
- systems, utmp/wtmp/lastlog handling on others) and drop privileges
- immediately. This is much safer than most other terminals that keep
- privileges while running (but is more relevant to urxvt, as it contains
- things as perl interpreters, which might be "helpful" to attackers).
-
- This forking is done as the very first within main(), which is very
- early and reduces possible bugs to initialisation code run before
- main(), or things like the dynamic loader of your system, which should
- result in very little risk.
-
- On Solaris 9, many line-drawing characters are too wide.
- Seems to be a known bug, read
- <http://nixdoc.net/files/forum/about34198.html>. Some people use the
- following ugly workaround to get non-double-wide-characters working:
-
- #define wcwidth(x) wcwidth(x) > 1 ? 1 : wcwidth(x)
-
- 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, that means rxvt-unicode only works in "POSIX", "ISO-8859-1" and
- "UTF-8" locales under FreeBSD (which all use Unicode as wchar_t.
-
- "__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 :)
-
- I use Solaris 9 and it doesn't compile/work/etc.
- Try the diff in doc/solaris9.patch as a base. It fixes the worst
- problems with "wcwidth" and a compile problem.
-
- How can I use rxvt-unicode under cygwin?
- rxvt-unicode should compile and run out of the box on cygwin, using the
- X11 libraries that come with cygwin. libW11 emulation is no longer
- supported (and makes no sense, either, as it only supported a single
- font). I recommend starting the X-server in "-multiwindow" or
- "-rootless" mode instead, which will result in similar look&feel as the
- old libW11 emulation.
-
- At the time of this writing, cygwin didn't seem to support any
- multi-byte encodings (you might try "LC_CTYPE=C-UTF-8"), so you are
- likely limited to 8-bit encodings.
-
projects / dana / urxvt.git / commitdiff