rxvt-unicode/README.FAQ

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
    The new selection selects pieces that are too big, how can I select
    single words?
        Yes. For example, if you want to select alphanumeric words, you can
        use the following resource:

           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

    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.

        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
           rxvt -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:

           convert wallpaper.jpg -blur 20x20 -modulate 30 background.xpm
           rxvt -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:

           rxvt -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.

    Isn't rxvt 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 :)

    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 (<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.

    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.
    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?
    Why doesn't vim/emacs etc. make use of italic?
    Why are the secondary screen-related options not working properly?
        Make sure you are using "TERM=rxvt-unicode". Some pre-packaged
        distributions (most notably Debian GNU/Linux) break rxvt-unicode by
        setting "TERM" to "rxvt", which doesn't have these extra features.
        Unfortunately, some of these (most notably, again, Debian GNU/Linux)
        furthermore fail to even install the "rxvt-unicode" terminfo file,
        so you will need to install it on your own (See the question When I
        log-in to another system it tells me about missing terminfo data? on
        how to do this).

    My numerical keypad acts weird and generates differing output?
        Some Debian GNUL/Linux users seem to have this problem, although no
        specific details were reported so far. It is possible that this is
        caused by the wrong "TERM" setting, although the details of wether
        and how this can happen are unknown, as "TERM=rxvt" should offer a
        compatible keymap. See the answer to the previous question, and
        please report if that helped.

    Rxvt-unicode does not seem to understand the selected encoding?
    Unicode does not seem to work?
        If you encounter strange problems like typing an accented character
        but getting two unrelated other characters or similar, or if program
        output is subtly garbled, then you should check your locale
        settings.

        Rxvt-unicode must be started with the same "LC_CTYPE" setting as the
        programs. Often rxvt-unicode is started in the "C" locale, while the
        login script running within the rxvt-unicode window changes the
        locale to something else, e.g. "en_GB.UTF-8". Needless to say, this
        is not going to work.

        The best thing is to fix your startup environment, as you will
        likely run into other problems. If nothing works you can try this in
        your .profile.

          printf '\e]701;%s\007' "$LC_CTYPE"

        If this doesn't work, then maybe you use a "LC_CTYPE" specification
        not supported on your systems. Some systems have a "locale" command
        which displays this (also, "perl -e0" can be used to check locale
        settings, as it will complain loudly if it cannot set the locale).
        If it displays something like:

          locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: ...

        Then the locale you specified is not supported on your system.

        If nothing works and you are sure that everything is set correctly
        then you will need to remember a little known fact: Some programs
        just don't support locales :(

    Why do some characters look so much different than others?
    How does rxvt-unicode choose fonts?
        Most fonts do not contain the full range of Unicode, which is fine.
        Chances are that the font you (or the admin/package maintainer of
        your system/os) have specified does not cover all the characters you
        want to display.

        rxvt-unicode makes a best-effort try at finding a replacement font.
        Often the result is fine, but sometimes the chosen font looks
        bad/ugly/wrong. Some fonts have totally strange characters that
        don't resemble the correct glyph at all, and rxvt-unicode lacks the
        artificial intelligence to detect that a specific glyph is wrong: it
        has to believe the font that the characters it claims to contain
        indeed look correct.

        In that case, select a font of your taste and add it to the font
        list, e.g.:

           rxvt -fn basefont,font2,font3...

        When rxvt-unicode sees a character, it will first look at the base
        font. If the base font does not contain the character, it will go to
        the next font, and so on. Specifying your own fonts will also speed
        up this search and use less resources within rxvt-unicode and the
        X-server.

        The only limitation is that none of the fonts may be larger than the
        base font, as the base font defines the terminal character cell
        size, which must be the same due to the way terminals work.

    Why do some chinese characters look so different than others?
        This is because there is a difference between script and language --
        rxvt-unicode does not know which language the text that is output
        is, as it only knows the unicode character codes. If rxvt-unicode
        first sees a japanese/chinese character, it might choose a japanese
        font for display. Subsequent japanese characters will use that font.
        Now, many chinese characters aren't represented in japanese fonts,
        so when the first non-japanese character comes up, rxvt-unicode will
        look for a chinese font -- unfortunately at this point, it will
        still use the japanese font for chinese characters that are also in
        the japanese font.

        The workaround is easy: just tag a chinese font at the end of your
        font list (see the previous question). The key is to view the font
        list as a preference list: If you expect more japanese, list a
        japanese font first. If you expect more chinese, put a chinese font
        first.

        In the future it might be possible to switch language preferences at
        runtime (the internal data structure has no problem with using
        different fonts for the same character at the same time, but no
        interface for this has been designed yet).

        Until then, you might get away with switching fonts at runtime (see
        "Can I switch the fonts at runtime?" later in this document).

    Why does rxvt-unicode sometimes leave pixel droppings?
        Most fonts were not designed for terminal use, which means that
        character size varies a lot. A font that is otherwise fine for
        terminal use might contain some characters that are simply too wide.
        Rxvt-unicode will avoid these characters. For characters that are
        just "a bit" too wide a special "careful" rendering mode is used
        that redraws adjacent characters.

        All of this requires that fonts do not lie about character sizes,
        however: Xft fonts often draw glyphs larger than their acclaimed
        bounding box, and rxvt-unicode has no way of detecting this (the
        correct way is to ask for the character bounding box, which
        unfortunately is wrong in these cases).

        It's not clear (to me at least), wether this is a bug in Xft,
        freetype, or the respective font. If you encounter this problem you
        might try using the "-lsp" option to give the font more height. If
        that doesn't work, you might be forced to use a different font.

        All of this is not a problem when using X11 core fonts, as their
        bounding box data is correct.

    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)

    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.

    How can I keep rxvt-unicode from using reverse video so much?
        First of all, make sure you are running with the right terminal
        settings ("TERM=rxvt-unicode"), which will get rid of most of these
        effects. Then make sure you have specified colours for italic and
        bold, as otherwise rxvt-unicode might use reverse video to simulate
        the effect:

           URxvt.colorBD:  white
           URxvt.colorIT:  green

    Some programs assume totally weird colours (red instead of blue), how
    can I fix that?
        For some unexplainable reason, some rare programs assume a very
        weird colour palette when confronted with a terminal with more than
        the standard 8 colours (rxvt-unicode supports 88). The right fix is,
        of course, to fix these programs not to assume non-ISO colours
        without very good reasons.

        In the meantime, you can either edit your "rxvt-unicode" terminfo
        definition to only claim 8 colour support or use "TERM=rxvt", which
        will fix colours but keep you from using other rxvt-unicode
        features.

    I am on FreeBSD and rxvt-unicode does not seem to work at all.
        Rxvt-unicode requires the symbol "__STDC_ISO_10646__" to be defined
        in your compile environment, or an implementation that implements
        it, wether it defines the symbol or not. "__STDC_ISO_10646__"
        requires that wchar_t is represented as unicode.

        As you might have guessed, FreeBSD does neither define this symobl
        nor does it support it. Instead, it uses it's own internal
        representation of wchar_t. This is, of course, completely fine with
        respect to standards.

        However, 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?
    Is there an option to switch encodings?
        Unlike some other terminals, rxvt-unicode has no encoding switch,
        and no specific "utf-8" mode, such as xterm. In fact, it doesn't
        even know about UTF-8 or any other encodings with respect to
        terminal I/O.

        The reasons is that there exists a perfectly fine mechanism for
        selecting the encoding, doing I/O and (most important) communicating
        this to all applications so everybody agrees on character properties
        such as width and code number. This mechanism is the *locale*.
        Applications not using that info will have problems (for example,
        "xterm" gets the width of characters wrong as it uses it's own,
        locale-independent table under all locales).

        Rxvt-unicode uses the "LC_CTYPE" locale category to select encoding.
        All programs doing the same (that is, most) will automatically agree
        in the interpretation of characters.

        Unfortunately, there is no system-independent way to select locales,
        nor is there a standard on how locale specifiers will look like.

        On most systems, the content of the "LC_CTYPE" environment variable
        contains an arbitrary string which corresponds to an
        already-installed locale. Common names for locales are
        "en_US.UTF-8", "de_DE.ISO-8859-15", "ja_JP.EUC-JP", i.e.
        "language_country.encoding", but other forms (i.e. "de" or "german")
        are also common.

        Rxvt-unicode ignores all other locale categories, and except for the
        encoding, ignores country or language-specific settings, i.e.
        "de_DE.UTF-8" and "ja_JP.UTF-8" are the normally same to
        rxvt-unicode.

        If you want to use a specific encoding you have to make sure you
        start rxvt-unicode with the correct "LC_CTYPE" category.

    Can I switch locales at runtime?
        Yes, using an escape sequence. Try something like this, which sets
        rxvt-unicode's idea of "LC_CTYPE".

          printf '\e]701;%s\007' ja_JP.SJIS

        See also the previous answer.

        Sometimes this capability is rather handy when you want to work in
        one locale (e.g. "de_DE.UTF-8") but some programs don't support it
        (e.g. UTF-8). For example, I use this script to start "xjdic", which
        first switches to a locale supported by xjdic and back later:

           printf '\e]701;%s\007' ja_JP.SJIS
           xjdic -js
           printf '\e]701;%s\007' de_DE.UTF-8

        You can also use xterm's "luit" program, which usually works fine,
        except for some locales where character width differs between
        program- and rxvt-unicode-locales.

    Can I switch the fonts at runtime?
        Yes, using an escape sequence. Try something like this, which has
        the same effect as using the "-fn" switch, and takes effect
        immediately:

           printf '\e]50;%s\007' "9x15bold,xft:Kochi Gothic"

        This is useful if you e.g. work primarily with japanese (and prefer
        a japanese font), but you have to switch to chinese temporarily,
        where japanese fonts would only be in your way.

        You can think of this as a kind of manual ISO-2022 switching.

    Why do italic characters look as if clipped?
        Many fonts have difficulties with italic characters and hinting. For
        example, the otherwise very nicely hinted font "xft:Bitstream Vera
        Sans Mono" completely fails in it's italic face. A workaround might
        be to enable freetype autohinting, i.e. like this:

           URxvt.italicFont:        xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:italic:autohint=true
           URxvt.boldItalicFont:    xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:bold:italic:autohint=true

    My input method wants <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.

    Rxvt-unicode uses gobs of memory, how can I reduce that?
        Rxvt-unicode tries to obey the rule of not charging you for
        something you don't use. One thing you should try is to configure
        out all settings that you don't need, for example, Xft support is a
        resource hog by design, when used. Compiling it out ensures that no
        Xft font will be loaded accidentally when rxvt-unicode tries to find
        a font for your characters.

        Also, many people (me included) like large windows and even larger
        scrollback buffers: Without "--enable-unicode3", rxvt-unicode will
        use 6 bytes per screen cell. For a 160x?? window this amounts to
        almost a kilobyte per line. A scrollback buffer of 10000 lines will
        then (if full) use 10 Megabytes of memory. With "--enable-unicode3"
        it gets worse, as rxvt-unicode then uses 8 bytes per screen cell.

    Can I speed up Xft rendering somehow?
        Yes, the most obvious way to speed it up is to avoid Xft entirely,
        as it is simply slow. If you still want Xft fonts you might try to
        disable antialiasing (by appending ":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.

    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?
        If no bold colour is set via "colorBD:", bold will invert text using
        the standard foreground colour.

        For the standard background colour, blinking will actually make the
        text blink when compiled with "--enable-blinking". with standard
        colours. Without "--enable-blinking", the blink attribute will be
        ignored.

        On ANSI colours, bold/blink attributes are used to set
        high-intensity foreground/background colors.

        color0-7 are the low-intensity colors.

        color8-15 are the corresponding high-intensity colors.

    I don't like the screen colors. How do I change them?
        You can change the screen colors at run-time using ~/.Xdefaults
        resources (or as long-options).

        Here are values that are supposed to resemble a VGA screen,
        including the murky brown that passes for low-intensity yellow:

           URxvt.color0:   #000000
           URxvt.color1:   #A80000
           URxvt.color2:   #00A800
           URxvt.color3:   #A8A800
           URxvt.color4:   #0000A8
           URxvt.color5:   #A800A8
           URxvt.color6:   #00A8A8
           URxvt.color7:   #A8A8A8

           URxvt.color8:   #000054
           URxvt.color9:   #FF0054
           URxvt.color10:  #00FF54
           URxvt.color11:  #FFFF54
           URxvt.color12:  #0000FF
           URxvt.color13:  #FF00FF
           URxvt.color14:  #00FFFF
           URxvt.color15:  #FFFFFF

        And here is a more complete set of non-standard colors described
        (not by me) as "pretty girly".

           URxvt.cursorColor:  #dc74d1
           URxvt.pointerColor: #dc74d1
           URxvt.background:   #0e0e0e
           URxvt.foreground:   #4ad5e1
           URxvt.color0:       #000000
           URxvt.color8:       #8b8f93
           URxvt.color1:       #dc74d1
           URxvt.color9:       #dc74d1
           URxvt.color2:       #0eb8c7
           URxvt.color10:      #0eb8c7
           URxvt.color3:       #dfe37e
           URxvt.color11:      #dfe37e
           URxvt.color5:       #9e88f0
           URxvt.color13:      #9e88f0
           URxvt.color6:       #73f7ff
           URxvt.color14:      #73f7ff
           URxvt.color7:       #e1dddd
           URxvt.color15:      #e1dddd

    How can I start rxvtd in a race-free way?
        Try "rxvtd -f -o", which tells rxvtd to open the display, create the
        listening socket and then fork.

    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
           $ rxvt

           # use Backspace = ^?
           $ stty erase ^?
           $ rxvt

        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 "rxvt -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 mappings that rxvt-unicode doesn't recognize.
           KP_Insert == Insert
           F22 == Print
           F27 == Home
           F29 == Prior
           F33 == End
           F35 == Next

        Rather than have rxvt-unicode try to accommodate all the various
        possible keyboard mappings, it is better to use `xmodmap' to remap
        the keys as required for your particular machine.

    How do I distinguish wether I'm running rxvt-unicode or a regular xterm?
    I need this to decide about setting colors etc.
        rxvt and rxvt-unicode always export the variable "COLORTERM", so you
        can check and see if that is set. Note that several programs, JED,
        slrn, Midnight Commander automatically check this variable to decide
        whether or not to use color.

    How do I set the correct, full IP address for the DISPLAY variable?
        If you've compiled rxvt-unicode with DISPLAY_IS_IP and have enabled
        insecure mode then it is possible to use the following shell script
        snippets to correctly set the display. If your version of
        rxvt-unicode wasn't also compiled with ESCZ_ANSWER (as assumed in
        these snippets) then the COLORTERM variable can be used to
        distinguish rxvt-unicode from a regular xterm.

        Courtesy of Chuck Blake <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 for myself?
        You need to have a recent version of perl installed as
        /usr/bin/perl, one that comes with pod2man, pod2text and pod2html.
        Then go to the doc subdirectory and enter "make alldoc".

    My question isn't answered here, can I ask a human?
        Before sending me mail, you could go to IRC: "irc.freenode.net",
        channel "#rxvt-unicode" has some rxvt-unicode enthusiasts that might
        be interested in learning about new and exciting problems (but not
        FAQs :).

Revision:	1.35
Committed:	Tue Jan 31 00:25:16 2006 UTC (18 years, 3 months ago) by root
Branch:	MAIN
Changes since 1.34:	+15 -5 lines
Log Message:	* empty log message *