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Revision: 1.13
Committed: Sun Apr 17 22:36:12 2005 UTC (19 years, 1 month ago) by root
Branch: MAIN
CVS Tags: rel-5_5, rel-5_4
Changes since 1.12: +10 -7 lines
Log Message:
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File Contents

# Content
1 FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
2 How do I know which rxvt-unicode version I'm using?
3 The version number is displayed with the usage (-h). Also the escape
4 sequence "ESC [ 8 n" sets the window title to the version number.
5
6 I am using Debian GNU/Linux and have a problem...
7 The Debian GNU/Linux package of rxvt-unicode contains large patches
8 that considerably change the behaviour of rxvt-unicode. Before
9 reporting a bug to the original rxvt-unicode author please download
10 and install the genuine version
11 (<http://software.schmorp.de#rxvt-unicode>) and try to reproduce the
12 problem. If you cannot, chances are that the problems are specific
13 to Debian GNU/Linux, in which case it should be reported via the
14 Debian Bug Tracking System (use "reportbug" to report the bug).
15
16 For other problems that also affect the Debian package, you can and
17 probably should use the Debian BTS, too, because, after all, it's
18 also a bug in the Debian version and it serves as a reminder for
19 other users that might encounter the same issue.
20
21 When I log-in to another system it tells me about missing terminfo data?
22 The terminal description used by rxvt-unicode is not as widely
23 available as that for xterm, or even rxvt (for which the same
24 problem often arises).
25
26 The correct solution for this problem is to install the terminfo,
27 this can be done like this (with ncurses' infocmp):
28
29 REMOTE=remotesystem.domain
30 infocmp rxvt-unicode | ssh $REMOTE "cat >/tmp/ti && tic /tmp/ti"
31
32 ... or by installing rxvt-unicode normally on the remote system,
33
34 If you cannot or do not want to do this, then you can simply set
35 "TERM=rxvt" or even "TERM=xterm", and live with the small number of
36 problems arising, which includes wrong keymapping, less and
37 different colours and some refresh errors in fullscreen
38 applications. It's a nice quick-and-dirty workaround for rare cases,
39 though.
40
41 If you always want to do this (and are fine with the consequences)
42 you can either recompile rxvt-unicode with the desired TERM value or
43 use a resource to set it:
44
45 URxvt.termName: rxvt
46
47 If you don't plan to use rxvt (quite common...) you could also
48 replace the rxvt terminfo file with the rxvt-unicode one.
49
50 "bash"'s readline does not work correctly under rxvt.
51 I need a termcap file entry.
52 One reason you might want this is that some distributions or
53 operating systems still compile some programs using the
54 long-obsoleted termcap library (Fedora Core's bash is one example)
55 and rely on a termcap entry for "rxvt-unicode".
56
57 You could use rxvt's termcap entry with resonable results in many
58 cases. You can also create a termcap entry by using terminfo's
59 infocmp program like this:
60
61 infocmp -C rxvt-unicode
62
63 Or you could use this termcap entry, generated by the command above:
64
65 rxvt-unicode|rxvt-unicode terminal (X Window System):\
66 :am:bw:eo:km:mi:ms:xn:xo:\
67 :co#80:it#8:li#24:lm#0:\
68 :AL=\E[%dL:DC=\E[%dP:DL=\E[%dM:DO=\E[%dB:IC=\E[%d@:\
69 :K1=\EOw:K2=\EOu:K3=\EOy:K4=\EOq:K5=\EOs:LE=\E[%dD:\
70 :RI=\E[%dC:SF=\E[%dS:SR=\E[%dT:UP=\E[%dA:ae=\E(B:al=\E[L:\
71 :as=\E(0:bl=^G:cd=\E[J:ce=\E[K:cl=\E[H\E[2J:\
72 :cm=\E[%i%d;%dH:cr=^M:cs=\E[%i%d;%dr:ct=\E[3g:dc=\E[P:\
73 :dl=\E[M:do=^J:ec=\E[%dX:ei=\E[4l:ho=\E[H:\
74 :i1=\E[?47l\E=\E[?1l:ic=\E[@:im=\E[4h:\
75 :is=\E[r\E[m\E[2J\E[H\E[?7h\E[?1;3;4;6l\E[4l:\
76 :k1=\E[11~:k2=\E[12~:k3=\E[13~:k4=\E[14~:k5=\E[15~:\
77 :k6=\E[17~:k7=\E[18~:k8=\E[19~:k9=\E[20~:kD=\E[3~:\
78 :kI=\E[2~:kN=\E[6~:kP=\E[5~:kb=\177:kd=\EOB:ke=\E[?1l\E>:\
79 :kh=\E[7~:kl=\EOD:kr=\EOC:ks=\E[?1h\E=:ku=\EOA:le=^H:\
80 :mb=\E[5m:md=\E[1m:me=\E[m\017:mr=\E[7m:nd=\E[C:rc=\E8:\
81 :sc=\E7:se=\E[27m:sf=^J:so=\E[7m:sr=\EM:st=\EH:ta=^I:\
82 :te=\E[r\E[?1049l:ti=\E[?1049h:ue=\E[24m:up=\E[A:\
83 :us=\E[4m:vb=\E[?5h\E[?5l:ve=\E[?25h:vi=\E[?25l:\
84 :vs=\E[?25h:
85
86 Why does "ls" no longer have coloured output?
87 The "ls" in the GNU coreutils unfortunately doesn't use terminfo to
88 decide wether a terminal has colour, but uses it's own configuration
89 file. Needless to say, "rxvt-unicode" is not in it's default file
90 (among with most other terminals supporting colour). Either add:
91
92 TERM rxvt-unicode
93
94 to "/etc/DIR_COLORS" or simply add:
95
96 alias ls='ls --color=auto'
97
98 to your ".profile" or ".bashrc".
99
100 Why doesn't vim/emacs etc. use the 88 colour mode?
101 Why doesn't vim/emacs etc. make use of italic?
102 Why are the secondary screen-related options not working properly?
103 Make sure you are using "TERM=rxvt-unicode". Some pre-packaged
104 distributions (most notably Debian GNU/Linux) break rxvt-unicode by
105 setting "TERM" to "rxvt", which doesn't have these extra features.
106 Unfortunately, some of these (most notably, again, Debian GNU/Linux)
107 furthermore fail to even install the "rxvt-unicode" terminfo file,
108 so you will need to install it on your own (See the question When I
109 log-in to another system it tells me about missing terminfo data? on
110 how to do this).
111
112 My numerical keypad acts weird and generates differing output?
113 Some Debian GNUL/Linux users seem to have this problem, although no
114 specific details were reported so far. It is possible that this is
115 caused by the wrong "TERM" setting, although the details of wether
116 and how this can happen are unknown, as "TERM=rxvt" should offer a
117 compatible keymap. See the answer to the previous question, and
118 please report if that helped.
119
120 Rxvt-unicode does not seem to understand the selected encoding?
121 Unicode does not seem to work?
122 If you encounter strange problems like typing an accented character
123 but getting two unrelated other characters or similar, or if program
124 output is subtly garbled, then you should check your locale
125 settings.
126
127 Rxvt-unicode must be started with the same "LC_CTYPE" setting as the
128 programs. Often rxvt-unicode is started in the "C" locale, while the
129 login script running within the rxvt-unicode window changes the
130 locale to something else, e.g. "en_GB.UTF-8". Needless to say, this
131 is not going to work.
132
133 The best thing is to fix your startup environment, as you will
134 likely run into other problems. If nothing works you can try this in
135 your .profile.
136
137 printf '\e]701;%s\007' "$LC_CTYPE"
138
139 If this doesn't work, then maybe you use a "LC_CTYPE" specification
140 not supported on your systems. Some systems have a "locale" command
141 which displays this (also, "perl -e0" can be used to check locale
142 settings, as it will complain loudly if it cannot set the locale).
143 If it displays something like:
144
145 locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: ...
146
147 Then the locale you specified is not supported on your system.
148
149 If nothing works and you are sure that everything is set correctly
150 then you will need to remember a little known fact: Some programs
151 just don't support locales :(
152
153 Why do some characters look so much different than others?
154 How does rxvt-unicode choose fonts?
155 Most fonts do not contain the full range of Unicode, which is fine.
156 Chances are that the font you (or the admin/package maintainer of
157 your system/os) have specified does not cover all the characters you
158 want to display.
159
160 rxvt-unicode makes a best-effort try at finding a replacement font.
161 Often the result is fine, but sometimes the chosen font looks
162 bad/ugly/wrong. Some fonts have totally strange characters that
163 don't resemble the correct glyph at all, and rxvt-unicode lacks the
164 artificial intelligence to detect that a specific glyph is wrong: it
165 has to believe the font that the characters it claims to contain
166 indeed look correct.
167
168 In that case, select a font of your taste and add it to the font
169 list, e.g.:
170
171 rxvt -fn basefont,font2,font3...
172
173 When rxvt-unicode sees a character, it will first look at the base
174 font. If the base font does not contain the character, it will go to
175 the next font, and so on. Specifying your own fonts will also speed
176 up this search and use less resources within rxvt-unicode and the
177 X-server.
178
179 The only limitation is that none of the fonts may be larger than the
180 base font, as the base font defines the terminal character cell
181 size, which must be the same due to the way terminals work.
182
183 Why do some chinese characters look so different than others?
184 This is because there is a difference between script and language --
185 rxvt-unicode does not know which language the text that is output
186 is, as it only knows the unicode character codes. If rxvt-unicode
187 first sees a japanese/chinese character, it might choose a japanese
188 font for display. Subsequent japanese characters will use that font.
189 Now, many chinese characters aren't represented in japanese fonts,
190 so when the first non-japanese character comes up, rxvt-unicode will
191 look for a chinese font -- unfortunately at this point, it will
192 still use the japanese font for chinese characters that are also in
193 the japanese font.
194
195 The workaround is easy: just tag a chinese font at the end of your
196 font list (see the previous question). The key is to view the font
197 list as a preference list: If you expect more japanese, list a
198 japanese font first. If you expect more chinese, put a chinese font
199 first.
200
201 In the future it might be possible to switch language preferences at
202 runtime (the internal data structure has no problem with using
203 different fonts for the same character at the same time, but no
204 interface for this has been designed yet).
205
206 Until then, you might get away with switching fonts at runtime (see
207 "Can I switch the fonts at runtime?" later in this document).
208
209 Why does rxvt-unicode sometimes leave pixel droppings?
210 Most fonts were not designed for terminal use, which means that
211 character size varies a lot. A font that is otherwise fine for
212 terminal use might contain some characters that are simply too wide.
213 Rxvt-unicode will avoid these characters. For characters that are
214 just "a bit" too wide a special "careful" rendering mode is used
215 that redraws adjacent characters.
216
217 All of this requires that fonts do not lie about character sizes,
218 however: Xft fonts often draw glyphs larger than their acclaimed
219 bounding box, and rxvt-unicode has no way of detecting this (the
220 correct way is to ask for the character bounding box, which
221 unfortunately is wrong in these cases).
222
223 It's not clear (to me at least), wether this is a bug in Xft,
224 freetype, or the respective font. If you encounter this problem you
225 might try using the "-lsp" option to give the font more height. If
226 that doesn't work, you might be forced to use a different font.
227
228 All of this is not a problem when using X11 core fonts, as their
229 bounding box data is correct.
230
231 My Compose (Multi_key) key is no longer working.
232 The most common causes for this are that either your locale is not
233 set correctly, or you specified a preeditStyle that is not supported
234 by your input method. For example, if you specified OverTheSpot and
235 your input method (e.g. the default input method handling Compose
236 keys) does not support this (for instance because it is not visual),
237 then rxvt-unicode will continue without an input method.
238
239 In this case either do not specify a preeditStyle or specify more
240 than one pre-edit style, such as OverTheSpot,Root,None.
241
242 I cannot type "Ctrl-Shift-2" to get an ASCII NUL character due to ISO
243 14755
244 Either try "Ctrl-2" alone (it often is mapped to ASCII NUL even on
245 international keyboards) or simply use ISO 14755 support to your
246 advantage, typing <Ctrl-Shift-0> to get a ASCII NUL. This works for
247 other codes, too, such as "Ctrl-Shift-1-d" to type the default
248 telnet escape character and so on.
249
250 How can I keep rxvt-unicode from using reverse video so much?
251 First of all, make sure you are running with the right terminal
252 settings ("TERM=rxvt-unicode"), which will get rid of most of these
253 effects. Then make sure you have specified colours for italic and
254 bold, as otherwise rxvt-unicode might use reverse video to simulate
255 the effect:
256
257 URxvt.colorBD: white
258 URxvt.colorIT: green
259
260 Some programs assume totally weird colours (red instead of blue), how
261 can I fix that?
262 For some unexplainable reason, some rare programs assume a very
263 weird colour palette when confronted with a terminal with more than
264 the standard 8 colours (rxvt-unicode supports 88). The right fix is,
265 of course, to fix these programs not to assume non-ISO colours
266 without very good reasons.
267
268 In the meantime, you can either edit your "rxvt-unicode" terminfo
269 definition to only claim 8 colour support or use "TERM=rxvt", which
270 will fix colours but keep you from using other rxvt-unicode
271 features.
272
273 I am on FreeBSD and rxvt-unicode does not seem to work at all.
274 Rxvt-unicode requires the symbol "__STDC_ISO_10646__" to be defined
275 in your compile environment, or an implementation that implements
276 it, wether it defines the symbol or not. "__STDC_ISO_10646__"
277 requires that wchar_t is represented as unicode.
278
279 As you might have guessed, FreeBSD does neither define this symobl
280 nor does it support it. Instead, it uses it's own internal
281 representation of wchar_t. This is, of course, completely fine with
282 respect to standards.
283
284 However, that means rxvt-unicode only works in "POSIX", "ISO-8859-1"
285 and "UTF-8" locales under FreeBSD (which all use Unicode as wchar_t.
286
287 "__STDC_ISO_10646__" is the only sane way to support multi-language
288 apps in an OS, as using a locale-dependent (and non-standardized)
289 representation of wchar_t makes it impossible to convert between
290 wchar_t (as used by X11 and your applications) and any other
291 encoding without implementing OS-specific-wrappers for each and
292 every locale. There simply are no APIs to convert wchar_t into
293 anything except the current locale encoding.
294
295 Some applications (such as the formidable mlterm) work around this
296 by carrying their own replacement functions for character set
297 handling with them, and either implementing OS-dependent hacks or
298 doing multiple conversions (which is slow and unreliable in case the
299 OS implements encodings slightly different than the terminal
300 emulator).
301
302 The rxvt-unicode author insists that the right way to fix this is in
303 the system libraries once and for all, instead of forcing every app
304 to carry complete replacements for them :)
305
306 How does rxvt-unicode determine the encoding to use?
307 Is there an option to switch encodings?
308 Unlike some other terminals, rxvt-unicode has no encoding switch,
309 and no specific "utf-8" mode, such as xterm. In fact, it doesn't
310 even know about UTF-8 or any other encodings with respect to
311 terminal I/O.
312
313 The reasons is that there exists a perfectly fine mechanism for
314 selecting the encoding, doing I/O and (most important) communicating
315 this to all applications so everybody agrees on character properties
316 such as width and code number. This mechanism is the *locale*.
317 Applications not using that info will have problems (for example,
318 "xterm" gets the width of characters wrong as it uses it's own,
319 locale-independent table under all locales).
320
321 Rxvt-unicode uses the "LC_CTYPE" locale category to select encoding.
322 All programs doing the same (that is, most) will automatically agree
323 in the interpretation of characters.
324
325 Unfortunately, there is no system-independent way to select locales,
326 nor is there a standard on how locale specifiers will look like.
327
328 On most systems, the content of the "LC_CTYPE" environment variable
329 contains an arbitrary string which corresponds to an
330 already-installed locale. Common names for locales are
331 "en_US.UTF-8", "de_DE.ISO-8859-15", "ja_JP.EUC-JP", i.e.
332 "language_country.encoding", but other forms (i.e. "de" or "german")
333 are also common.
334
335 Rxvt-unicode ignores all other locale categories, and except for the
336 encoding, ignores country or language-specific settings, i.e.
337 "de_DE.UTF-8" and "ja_JP.UTF-8" are the normally same to
338 rxvt-unicode.
339
340 If you want to use a specific encoding you have to make sure you
341 start rxvt-unicode with the correct "LC_CTYPE" category.
342
343 Can I switch locales at runtime?
344 Yes, using an escape sequence. Try something like this, which sets
345 rxvt-unicode's idea of "LC_CTYPE".
346
347 printf '\e]701;%s\007' ja_JP.SJIS
348
349 See also the previous answer.
350
351 Sometimes this capability is rather handy when you want to work in
352 one locale (e.g. "de_DE.UTF-8") but some programs don't support it
353 (e.g. UTF-8). For example, I use this script to start "xjdic", which
354 first switches to a locale supported by xjdic and back later:
355
356 printf '\e]701;%s\007' ja_JP.SJIS
357 xjdic -js
358 printf '\e]701;%s\007' de_DE.UTF-8
359
360 You can also use xterm's "luit" program, which usually works fine,
361 except for some locales where character width differs between
362 program- and rxvt-unicode-locales.
363
364 Can I switch the fonts at runtime?
365 Yes, using an escape sequence. Try something like this, which has
366 the same effect as using the "-fn" switch, and takes effect
367 immediately:
368
369 printf '\e]50;%s\007' "9x15bold,xft:Kochi Gothic"
370
371 This is useful if you e.g. work primarily with japanese (and prefer
372 a japanese font), but you have to switch to chinese temporarily,
373 where japanese fonts would only be in your way.
374
375 You can think of this as a kind of manual ISO-2022 switching.
376
377 Why do italic characters look as if clipped?
378 Many fonts have difficulties with italic characters and hinting. For
379 example, the otherwise very nicely hinted font "xft:Bitstream Vera
380 Sans Mono" completely fails in it's italic face. A workaround might
381 be to enable freetype autohinting, i.e. like this:
382
383 URxvt.italicFont: xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:italic:autohint=true
384 URxvt.boldItalicFont: xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:bold:italic:autohint=true
385
386 My input method wants <some encoding> but I want UTF-8, what can I do?
387 You can specify separate locales for the input method and the rest
388 of the terminal, using the resource "imlocale":
389
390 URxvt*imlocale: ja_JP.EUC-JP
391
392 Now you can start your terminal with "LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8" and
393 still use your input method. Please note, however, that you will not
394 be able to input characters outside "EUC-JP" in a normal way then,
395 as your input method limits you.
396
397 Rxvt-unicode crashes when the X Input Method changes or exits.
398 Unfortunately, this is unavoidable, as the XIM protocol is racy by
399 design. Applications can avoid some crashes at the expense of memory
400 leaks, and Input Methods can avoid some crashes by careful ordering
401 at exit time. kinput2 (and derived input methods) generally
402 succeeds, while SCIM (or similar input methods) fails. In the end,
403 however, crashes cannot be completely avoided even if both sides
404 cooperate.
405
406 So the only workaround is not to kill your Input Method Servers.
407
408 Rxvt-unicode uses gobs of memory, how can I reduce that?
409 Rxvt-unicode tries to obey the rule of not charging you for
410 something you don't use. One thing you should try is to configure
411 out all settings that you don't need, for example, Xft support is a
412 resource hog by design, when used. Compiling it out ensures that no
413 Xft font will be loaded accidentally when rxvt-unicode tries to find
414 a font for your characters.
415
416 Also, many people (me included) like large windows and even larger
417 scrollback buffers: Without "--enable-unicode3", rxvt-unicode will
418 use 6 bytes per screen cell. For a 160x?? window this amounts to
419 almost a kilobyte per line. A scrollback buffer of 10000 lines will
420 then (if full) use 10 Megabytes of memory. With "--enable-unicode3"
421 it gets worse, as rxvt-unicode then uses 8 bytes per screen cell.
422
423 Can I speed up Xft rendering somehow?
424 Yes, the most obvious way to speed it up is to avoid Xft entirely,
425 as it is simply slow. If you still want Xft fonts you might try to
426 disable antialiasing (by appending ":antialiasing=false"), which
427 saves lots of memory and also speeds up rendering considerably.
428
429 Rxvt-unicode doesn't seem to anti-alias its fonts, what is wrong?
430 Rxvt-unicode will use whatever you specify as a font. If it needs to
431 fall back to it's default font search list it will prefer X11 core
432 fonts, because they are small and fast, and then use Xft fonts. It
433 has antialiasing disabled for most of them, because the author
434 thinks they look best that way.
435
436 If you want antialiasing, you have to specify the fonts manually.
437
438 Mouse cut/paste suddenly no longer works.
439 Make sure that mouse reporting is actually turned off since killing
440 some editors prematurely may leave the mouse in mouse report mode.
441 I've heard that tcsh may use mouse reporting unless it otherwise
442 specified. A quick check is to see if cut/paste works when the Alt
443 or Shift keys are depressed. See rxvt(7)
444
445 What's with this bold/blink stuff?
446 If no bold colour is set via "colorBD:", bold will invert text using
447 the standard foreground colour.
448
449 For the standard background colour, blinking will actually make the
450 text blink when compiled with "--enable-blinking". with standard
451 colours. Without "--enable-blinking", the blink attribute will be
452 ignored.
453
454 On ANSI colours, bold/blink attributes are used to set
455 high-intensity foreground/background colors.
456
457 color0-7 are the low-intensity colors.
458
459 color8-15 are the corresponding high-intensity colors.
460
461 I don't like the screen colors. How do I change them?
462 You can change the screen colors at run-time using ~/.Xdefaults
463 resources (or as long-options).
464
465 Here are values that are supposed to resemble a VGA screen,
466 including the murky brown that passes for low-intensity yellow:
467
468 URxvt.color0: #000000
469 URxvt.color1: #A80000
470 URxvt.color2: #00A800
471 URxvt.color3: #A8A800
472 URxvt.color4: #0000A8
473 URxvt.color5: #A800A8
474 URxvt.color6: #00A8A8
475 URxvt.color7: #A8A8A8
476
477 URxvt.color8: #000054
478 URxvt.color9: #FF0054
479 URxvt.color10: #00FF54
480 URxvt.color11: #FFFF54
481 URxvt.color12: #0000FF
482 URxvt.color13: #FF00FF
483 URxvt.color14: #00FFFF
484 URxvt.color15: #FFFFFF
485
486 And here is a more complete set of non-standard colors described
487 (not by me) as "pretty girly".
488
489 URxvt.cursorColor: #dc74d1
490 URxvt.pointerColor: #dc74d1
491 URxvt.background: #0e0e0e
492 URxvt.foreground: #4ad5e1
493 URxvt.color0: #000000
494 URxvt.color8: #8b8f93
495 URxvt.color1: #dc74d1
496 URxvt.color9: #dc74d1
497 URxvt.color2: #0eb8c7
498 URxvt.color10: #0eb8c7
499 URxvt.color3: #dfe37e
500 URxvt.color11: #dfe37e
501 URxvt.color5: #9e88f0
502 URxvt.color13: #9e88f0
503 URxvt.color6: #73f7ff
504 URxvt.color14: #73f7ff
505 URxvt.color7: #e1dddd
506 URxvt.color15: #e1dddd
507
508 How can I start rxvtd in a race-free way?
509 Despite it's name, rxvtd is not a real daemon, but more like a
510 server that answers rxvtc's requests, so it doesn't background
511 itself.
512
513 To ensure rxvtd is listening on it's socket, you can use the
514 following method to wait for the startup message before continuing:
515
516 { rxvtd & } | read
517
518 What's with the strange Backspace/Delete key behaviour?
519 Assuming that the physical Backspace key corresponds to the
520 BackSpace keysym (not likely for Linux ... see the following
521 question) there are two standard values that can be used for
522 Backspace: "^H" and "^?".
523
524 Historically, either value is correct, but rxvt-unicode adopts the
525 debian policy of using "^?" when unsure, because it's the one only
526 only correct choice :).
527
528 Rxvt-unicode tries to inherit the current stty settings and uses the
529 value of `erase' to guess the value for backspace. If rxvt-unicode
530 wasn't started from a terminal (say, from a menu or by remote
531 shell), then the system value of `erase', which corresponds to
532 CERASE in <termios.h>, will be used (which may not be the same as
533 your stty setting).
534
535 For starting a new rxvt-unicode:
536
537 # use Backspace = ^H
538 $ stty erase ^H
539 $ rxvt
540
541 # use Backspace = ^?
542 $ stty erase ^?
543 $ rxvt
544
545 Toggle with "ESC [ 36 h" / "ESC [ 36 l" as documented in rxvt(7).
546
547 For an existing rxvt-unicode:
548
549 # use Backspace = ^H
550 $ stty erase ^H
551 $ echo -n "^[[36h"
552
553 # use Backspace = ^?
554 $ stty erase ^?
555 $ echo -n "^[[36l"
556
557 This helps satisfy some of the Backspace discrepancies that occur,
558 but if you use Backspace = "^H", make sure that the termcap/terminfo
559 value properly reflects that.
560
561 The Delete key is a another casualty of the ill-defined Backspace
562 problem. To avoid confusion between the Backspace and Delete keys,
563 the Delete key has been assigned an escape sequence to match the
564 vt100 for Execute ("ESC [ 3 ~") and is in the supplied
565 termcap/terminfo.
566
567 Some other Backspace problems:
568
569 some editors use termcap/terminfo, some editors (vim I'm told)
570 expect Backspace = ^H, GNU Emacs (and Emacs-like editors) use ^H for
571 help.
572
573 Perhaps someday this will all be resolved in a consistent manner.
574
575 I don't like the key-bindings. How do I change them?
576 There are some compile-time selections available via configure.
577 Unless you have run "configure" with the "--disable-resources"
578 option you can use the `keysym' resource to alter the keystrings
579 associated with keysyms.
580
581 Here's an example for a URxvt session started using "rxvt -name
582 URxvt"
583
584 URxvt.keysym.Home: \033[1~
585 URxvt.keysym.End: \033[4~
586 URxvt.keysym.C-apostrophe: \033<C-'>
587 URxvt.keysym.C-slash: \033<C-/>
588 URxvt.keysym.C-semicolon: \033<C-;>
589 URxvt.keysym.C-grave: \033<C-`>
590 URxvt.keysym.C-comma: \033<C-,>
591 URxvt.keysym.C-period: \033<C-.>
592 URxvt.keysym.C-0x60: \033<C-`>
593 URxvt.keysym.C-Tab: \033<C-Tab>
594 URxvt.keysym.C-Return: \033<C-Return>
595 URxvt.keysym.S-Return: \033<S-Return>
596 URxvt.keysym.S-space: \033<S-Space>
597 URxvt.keysym.M-Up: \033<M-Up>
598 URxvt.keysym.M-Down: \033<M-Down>
599 URxvt.keysym.M-Left: \033<M-Left>
600 URxvt.keysym.M-Right: \033<M-Right>
601 URxvt.keysym.M-C-0: list \033<M-C- 0123456789 >
602 URxvt.keysym.M-C-a: list \033<M-C- abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz >
603 URxvt.keysym.F12: command:\033]701;zh_CN.GBK\007
604
605 See some more examples in the documentation for the keysym resource.
606
607 I'm using keyboard model XXX that has extra Prior/Next/Insert keys. How
608 do I make use of them? For example, the Sun Keyboard type 4 has the
609 following mappings that rxvt-unicode doesn't recognize.
610 KP_Insert == Insert
611 F22 == Print
612 F27 == Home
613 F29 == Prior
614 F33 == End
615 F35 == Next
616
617 Rather than have rxvt-unicode try to accommodate all the various
618 possible keyboard mappings, it is better to use `xmodmap' to remap
619 the keys as required for your particular machine.
620
621 How do I distinguish wether I'm running rxvt-unicode or a regular xterm?
622 I need this to decide about setting colors etc.
623 rxvt and rxvt-unicode always export the variable "COLORTERM", so you
624 can check and see if that is set. Note that several programs, JED,
625 slrn, Midnight Commander automatically check this variable to decide
626 whether or not to use color.
627
628 How do I set the correct, full IP address for the DISPLAY variable?
629 If you've compiled rxvt-unicode with DISPLAY_IS_IP and have enabled
630 insecure mode then it is possible to use the following shell script
631 snippets to correctly set the display. If your version of
632 rxvt-unicode wasn't also compiled with ESCZ_ANSWER (as assumed in
633 these snippets) then the COLORTERM variable can be used to
634 distinguish rxvt-unicode from a regular xterm.
635
636 Courtesy of Chuck Blake <cblake@BBN.COM> with the following shell
637 script snippets:
638
639 # Bourne/Korn/POSIX family of shells:
640 [ ${TERM:-foo} = foo ] && TERM=xterm # assume an xterm if we don't know
641 if [ ${TERM:-foo} = xterm ]; then
642 stty -icanon -echo min 0 time 15 # see if enhanced rxvt or not
643 echo -n '^[Z'
644 read term_id
645 stty icanon echo
646 if [ ""${term_id} = '^[[?1;2C' -a ${DISPLAY:-foo} = foo ]; then
647 echo -n '^[[7n' # query the rxvt we are in for the DISPLAY string
648 read DISPLAY # set it in our local shell
649 fi
650 fi
651
652 How do I compile the manual pages for myself?
653 You need to have a recent version of perl installed as
654 /usr/bin/perl, one that comes with pod2man, pod2text and pod2html.
655 Then go to the doc subdirectory and enter "make alldoc".
656
657 My question isn't answered here, can I ask a human?
658 Before sending me mail, you could go to IRC: "irc.freenode.net",
659 channel "#rxvt-unicode" has some rxvt-unicode enthusiasts that might
660 be interested in learning about new and exciting problems (but not
661 FAQs :).
662