--- rxvt-unicode/README.FAQ 2006/01/31 01:42:21 1.38 +++ rxvt-unicode/README.FAQ 2006/01/31 20:52:19 1.39 @@ -1,122 +1,85 @@ FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS - 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 rxvtperl(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 - - 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. - - 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. + 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 :). - Here are four ways to get transparency. Do read the manpage and option - descriptions for the programs mentioned and rxvt-unicode. Really, do it! + 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: - 1. Use inheritPixmap: + rxvt -pe tabbed - Esetroot wallpaper.jpg - rxvt -ip -tint red -sh 40 + URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,tabbed - That works. If you think it doesn't, you lack transparency and tinting - support, or you are unable to read. + 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. - 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: + 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 rxvtc client, the version displayed is that of the daemon. - convert wallpaper.jpg -blur 20x20 -modulate 30 background.xpm - rxvt -pixmap background.xpm -pe automove-background + 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. - That works. If you think it doesn't, you lack XPM and Perl support, or - you are unable to read. + 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. - 3. Use an ARGB visual: + How can I start rxvtd in a race-free way? + Try "rxvtd -f -o", which tells rxvtd to open the display, create the + listening socket and then fork. - rxvt -depth 32 -fg grey90 -bg rgba:0000/0000/4444/cccc + 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. - 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. + 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. - 4. Use xcompmgr and let it do the job: + Courtesy of Chuck Blake with the following shell script + snippets: - xprop -frame -f _NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY 32c \ - -set _NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY 0xc0000000 + # 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 - 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. + 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 supposed to be small? Don't all those features bloat? + 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 @@ -157,7 +120,7 @@ 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? + 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 @@ -190,249 +153,54 @@ No large bloated libraries (of course, none were linked in statically), except maybe libX11 :) - 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: - - rxvt -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 rxvtc client, the version displayed is that of the daemon. - - 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 () 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. - - 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 rxvt. - 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). - - 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? - 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. + 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. - 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. + Here are four ways to get transparency. Do read the manpage and option + descriptions for the programs mentioned and rxvt-unicode. Really, do it! - printf '\e]701;%s\007' "$LC_CTYPE" + 1. Use inheritPixmap: - 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: + Esetroot wallpaper.jpg + rxvt -ip -tint red -sh 40 - locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: ... + That works. If you think it doesn't, you lack transparency and tinting + support, or you are unable to read. - Then the locale you specified is not supported on your system. + 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: - 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 :( + convert wallpaper.jpg -blur 20x20 -modulate 30 background.xpm + rxvt -pixmap background.xpm -pe automove-background - Why do some characters look so much different than others? - See next entry. + That works. If you think it doesn't, you lack XPM and Perl support, or + you are unable to read. - 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. + 3. Use an ARGB visual: - 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. + rxvt -depth 32 -fg grey90 -bg rgba:0000/0000/4444/cccc - In that case, select a font of your taste and add it to the font list, - e.g.: + 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. - rxvt -fn basefont,font2,font3... + 4. Use xcompmgr and let it do the job: - 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. + xprop -frame -f _NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY 32c \ + -set _NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY 0xc0000000 - 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. + 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? + 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 @@ -456,7 +224,7 @@ 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? + 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 @@ -478,32 +246,7 @@ All of this is not a problem when using X11 core fonts, as their bounding box data is correct. - On Solaris 9, many line-drawing characters are too wide. - Seems to be a known bug, read - . Some people use the - following ugly workaround to get non-double-wide-characters working: - - #define wcwidth(x) wcwidth(x) > 1 ? 1 : wcwidth(x) - - 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? + 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 @@ -512,7 +255,7 @@ URxvt.colorBD: white URxvt.colorIT: green - Some programs assume totally weird colours (red instead of blue), how can I fix that? + 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 @@ -523,111 +266,7 @@ 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, 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. - - 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. - - Can I switch the fonts at runtime? + 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: @@ -639,7 +278,7 @@ You can think of this as a kind of manual ISO-2022 switching. - Why do italic characters look as if clipped? + 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 @@ -648,49 +287,13 @@ 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 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. - - 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? + 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 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 @@ -699,14 +302,7 @@ 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. - - What's with this bold/blink stuff? + What's with this bold/blink stuff? If no bold colour is set via "colorBD:", bold will invert text using the standard foreground colour. @@ -721,7 +317,7 @@ color8-15 are the corresponding high-intensity colors. - I don't like the screen colors. How do I change them? + 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). @@ -768,11 +364,123 @@ URxvt.color7: #e1dddd URxvt.color15: #e1dddd - How can I start rxvtd in a race-free way? - Try "rxvtd -f -o", which tells rxvtd to open the display, create the - listening socket and then fork. + 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.: + + 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. + + 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 rxvtperl(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 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? + 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 "^?". @@ -826,7 +534,7 @@ Perhaps someday this will all be resolved in a consistent manner. - I don't like the key-bindings. How do I change them? + 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 @@ -857,7 +565,7 @@ 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. + 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 @@ -869,43 +577,341 @@ 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. + 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. - 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. + 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). - Courtesy of Chuck Blake with the following shell script - snippets: + Also consider the form resources have to use: - # 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 + URxvt.resource: value - 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". + 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. - 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 :). + 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 rxvt. + 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 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 () 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 + . 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.