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Revision: 1.36
Committed: Tue Jan 31 00:53:49 2006 UTC (18 years, 3 months ago) by root
Branch: MAIN
Changes since 1.35: +16 -0 lines
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# Content
1 FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
2 The new selection selects pieces that are too big, how can I select
3 single words?
4 Yes. For example, if you want to select alphanumeric words, you can
5 use the following resource:
6
7 URxvt.selection.pattern-0: ([[:word:]]+)
8
9 If you click more than twice, the selection will be extended more
10 and more.
11
12 To get a selection that is very similar to the old code, try this
13 pattern:
14
15 URxvt.selection.pattern-0: ([^"&'()*,;<=>?@[\\\\]^`{|})]+)
16
17 Please also note that the *LeftClick Shift-LeftClik* combination
18 also selects words like the old code.
19
20 I don't like the new selection/popups/hotkeys/perl, how do I
21 change/disable it?
22 You can disable the perl extension completely by setting the
23 perl-ext-common resource to the empty string, which also keeps
24 rxvt-unicode from initialising perl, saving memory.
25
26 If you only want to disable specific features, you first have to
27 identify which perl extension is responsible. For this, read the
28 section PREPACKAGED EXTENSIONS in the rxvtperl(3) manpage. For
29 example, to disable the selection-popup and option-popup, specify
30 this perl-ext-common resource:
31
32 URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,-selection-popup,-option-popup
33
34 This will keep the default extensions, but disable the two popup
35 extensions. Some extensions can also be configured, for example,
36 scrollback search mode is triggered by M-s. You can move it to any
37 other combination either by setting the searchable-scrollback
38 resource:
39
40 URxvt.searchable-scrollback: CM-s
41
42 The cursor moves when selecting text in the current input line, how do I
43 switch this off?
44 During rlogin/ssh/telnet/etc. sessions, clicking near the cursor outputs
45 strange escape sequences, how do I fix this?
46 These are caused by the "readline" perl extension. Under normal
47 circumstances, it will move your cursor around when you click into
48 the line that contains it. It tries hard not to do this at the wrong
49 moment, but when running a program that doesn't parse cursor
50 movements or in some cases during rlogin sessions, it fails to
51 detect this properly.
52
53 You can permamently switch this feature off by disabling the
54 "readline" extension:
55
56 URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,-readline
57
58 Why doesn't rxvt-unicode read my resources?
59 Well, why, indeed? It does, in a way very similar to other X
60 applications. Most importantly, this means that if you or your OS
61 loads resources into the X display (the right way to do it),
62 rxvt-unicode will ignore any resource files in your home directory.
63 It will only read $HOME/.Xdefaults when no resources are attached to
64 the display.
65
66 If you have or use an $HOME/.Xresources file, chances are that
67 resources are loaded into your X-server. In this case, you have to
68 re-login after every change (or run xrdb -merge $HOME/.Xresources).
69
70 Also consider the form resources have to use:
71
72 URxvt.resource: value
73
74 If you want to use another form (there are lots of different ways of
75 specifying resources), make sure you understand wether and why it
76 works. If unsure, use the form above.
77
78 I can't get transparency working, what am I doing wrong?
79 First of all, transparency isn't officially supported in
80 rxvt-unicode, so you are mostly on your own. Do not bug the author
81 about it (but you may bug everybody else). Also, if you can't get it
82 working consider it a rite of passage: ... and you failed.
83
84 Here are four ways to get transparency. Do read the manpage and
85 option descriptions for the programs mentioned and rxvt-unicode.
86 Really, do it!
87
88 1. Use inheritPixmap:
89
90 Esetroot wallpaper.jpg
91 rxvt -ip -tint red -sh 40
92
93 That works. If you think it doesn't, you lack transparency and
94 tinting support, or you are unable to read.
95
96 2. Use a simple pixmap and emulate pseudo-transparency. This enables
97 you to use effects other than tinting and shading: Just
98 shade/tint/whatever your picture with gimp:
99
100 convert wallpaper.jpg -blur 20x20 -modulate 30 background.xpm
101 rxvt -pixmap background.xpm -pe automove-background
102
103 That works. If you think it doesn't, you lack XPM and Perl support,
104 or you are unable to read.
105
106 3. Use an ARGB visual:
107
108 rxvt -depth 32 -fg grey90 -bg rgba:0000/0000/4444/cccc
109
110 This requires XFT support, and the support of your X-server. If that
111 doesn't work for you, blame Xorg and Keith Packard. ARGB visuals
112 aren't there yet, no matter what they claim. Rxvt-Unicode contains
113 the neccessary bugfixes and workarounds for Xft and Xlib to make it
114 work, but that doesn't mean that your WM has the required kludges in
115 place.
116
117 4. Use xcompmgr and let it do the job:
118
119 xprop -frame -f _NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY 32c \
120 -set _NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY 0xc0000000
121
122 Then click on a window you want to make transparent. Replace
123 0xc0000000 by other values to change the degree of opacity. If it
124 doesn't work and your server crashes, you got to keep the pieces.
125
126 Isn't rxvt supposed to be small? Don't all those features bloat?
127 I often get asked about this, and I think, no, they didn't cause
128 extra bloat. If you compare a minimal rxvt and a minimal urxvt, you
129 can see that the urxvt binary is larger (due to some encoding tables
130 always being compiled in), but it actually uses less memory (RSS)
131 after startup. Even with "--disable-everything", this comparison is
132 a bit unfair, as many features unique to urxvt (locale, encoding
133 conversion, iso14755 etc.) are already in use in this mode.
134
135 text data bss drs rss filename
136 98398 1664 24 15695 1824 rxvt --disable-everything
137 188985 9048 66616 18222 1788 urxvt --disable-everything
138
139 When you "--enable-everything" (which _is_ unfair, as this involves
140 xft and full locale/XIM support which are quite bloaty inside libX11
141 and my libc), the two diverge, but not unreasnobaly so.
142
143 text data bss drs rss filename
144 163431 2152 24 20123 2060 rxvt --enable-everything
145 1035683 49680 66648 29096 3680 urxvt --enable-everything
146
147 The very large size of the text section is explained by the
148 east-asian encoding tables, which, if unused, take up disk space but
149 nothing else and can be compiled out unless you rely on X11 core
150 fonts that use those encodings. The BSS size comes from the 64k
151 emergency buffer that my c++ compiler allocates (but of course
152 doesn't use unless you are out of memory). Also, using an xft font
153 instead of a core font immediately adds a few megabytes of RSS. Xft
154 indeed is responsible for a lot of RSS even when not used.
155
156 Of course, due to every character using two or four bytes instead of
157 one, a large scrollback buffer will ultimately make rxvt-unicode use
158 more memory.
159
160 Compared to e.g. Eterm (5112k), aterm (3132k) and xterm (4680k),
161 this still fares rather well. And compared to some monsters like
162 gnome-terminal (21152k + extra 4204k in separate processes) or
163 konsole (22200k + extra 43180k in daemons that stay around after
164 exit, plus half a minute of startup time, including the hundreds of
165 warnings it spits out), it fares extremely well *g*.
166
167 Why C++, isn't that unportable/bloated/uncool?
168 Is this a question? :) It comes up very often. The simple answer is:
169 I had to write it, and C++ allowed me to write and maintain it in a
170 fraction of the time and effort (which is a scarce resource for me).
171 Put even shorter: It simply wouldn't exist without C++.
172
173 My personal stance on this is that C++ is less portable than C, but
174 in the case of rxvt-unicode this hardly matters, as its portability
175 limits are defined by things like X11, pseudo terminals, locale
176 support and unix domain sockets, which are all less portable than
177 C++ itself.
178
179 Regarding the bloat, see the above question: It's easy to write
180 programs in C that use gobs of memory, an certainly possible to
181 write programs in C++ that don't. C++ also often comes with large
182 libraries, but this is not necessarily the case with GCC. Here is
183 what rxvt links against on my system with a minimal config:
184
185 libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x00002aaaaabc3000)
186 libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00002aaaaadde000)
187 libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00002aaaab01d000)
188 /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00002aaaaaaab000)
189
190 And here is rxvt-unicode:
191
192 libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x00002aaaaabc3000)
193 libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00002aaaaada2000)
194 libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00002aaaaaeb0000)
195 libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00002aaaab0ee000)
196 /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00002aaaaaaab000)
197
198 No large bloated libraries (of course, none were linked in
199 statically), except maybe libX11 :)
200
201 Does it support tabs, can I have a tabbed rxvt-unicode?
202 Beginning with version 7.3, there is a perl extension that
203 implements a simple tabbed terminal. It is installed by default, so
204 any of these should give you tabs:
205
206 rxvt -pe tabbed
207
208 URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,tabbed
209
210 It will also work fine with tabbing functionality of many window
211 managers or similar tabbing programs, and its embedding-features
212 allow it to be embedded into other programs, as witnessed by
213 doc/rxvt-tabbed or the upcoming "Gtk2::URxvt" perl module, which
214 features a tabbed urxvt (murxvt) terminal as an example embedding
215 application.
216
217 How do I know which rxvt-unicode version I'm using?
218 The version number is displayed with the usage (-h). Also the escape
219 sequence "ESC [ 8 n" sets the window title to the version number.
220 When using the rxvtc client, the version displayed is that of the
221 daemon.
222
223 I am using Debian GNU/Linux and have a problem...
224 The Debian GNU/Linux package of rxvt-unicode in sarge contains large
225 patches that considerably change the behaviour of rxvt-unicode (but
226 unfortunately this notice has been removed). Before reporting a bug
227 to the original rxvt-unicode author please download and install the
228 genuine version (<http://software.schmorp.de#rxvt-unicode>) and try
229 to reproduce the problem. If you cannot, chances are that the
230 problems are specific to Debian GNU/Linux, in which case it should
231 be reported via the Debian Bug Tracking System (use "reportbug" to
232 report the bug).
233
234 For other problems that also affect the Debian package, you can and
235 probably should use the Debian BTS, too, because, after all, it's
236 also a bug in the Debian version and it serves as a reminder for
237 other users that might encounter the same issue.
238
239 I am maintaining rxvt-unicode for distribution/OS XXX, any
240 recommendation?
241 You should build one binary with the default options. configure now
242 enables most useful options, and the trend goes to making them
243 runtime-switchable, too, so there is usually no drawback to enbaling
244 them, except higher disk and possibly memory usage. The perl
245 interpreter should be enabled, as important functionality (menus,
246 selection, likely more in the future) depends on it.
247
248 You should not overwrite the "perl-ext-common" snd "perl-ext"
249 resources system-wide (except maybe with "defaults"). This will
250 result in useful behaviour. If your distribution aims at low memory,
251 add an empty "perl-ext-common" resource to the app-defaults file.
252 This will keep the perl interpreter disabled until the user enables
253 it.
254
255 If you can/want build more binaries, I recommend building a minimal
256 one with "--disable-everything" (very useful) and a maximal one with
257 "--enable-everything" (less useful, it will be very big due to a lot
258 of encodings built-in that increase download times and are rarely
259 used).
260
261 I need to make it setuid/setgid to support utmp/ptys on my OS, is this
262 safe?
263 It should be, starting with release 7.1. You are encouraged to
264 properly install urxvt with privileges necessary for your OS now.
265
266 When rxvt-unicode detects that it runs setuid or setgid, it will
267 fork into a helper process for privileged operations (pty handling
268 on some systems, utmp/wtmp/lastlog handling on others) and drop
269 privileges immediately. This is much safer than most other terminals
270 that keep privileges while running (but is more relevant to urxvt,
271 as it contains things as perl interpreters, which might be "helpful"
272 to attackers).
273
274 This forking is done as the very first within main(), which is very
275 early and reduces possible bugs to initialisation code run before
276 main(), or things like the dynamic loader of your system, which
277 should result in very little risk.
278
279 When I log-in to another system it tells me about missing terminfo data?
280 The terminal description used by rxvt-unicode is not as widely
281 available as that for xterm, or even rxvt (for which the same
282 problem often arises).
283
284 The correct solution for this problem is to install the terminfo,
285 this can be done like this (with ncurses' infocmp):
286
287 REMOTE=remotesystem.domain
288 infocmp rxvt-unicode | ssh $REMOTE "cat >/tmp/ti && tic /tmp/ti"
289
290 ... or by installing rxvt-unicode normally on the remote system,
291
292 If you cannot or do not want to do this, then you can simply set
293 "TERM=rxvt" or even "TERM=xterm", and live with the small number of
294 problems arising, which includes wrong keymapping, less and
295 different colours and some refresh errors in fullscreen
296 applications. It's a nice quick-and-dirty workaround for rare cases,
297 though.
298
299 If you always want to do this (and are fine with the consequences)
300 you can either recompile rxvt-unicode with the desired TERM value or
301 use a resource to set it:
302
303 URxvt.termName: rxvt
304
305 If you don't plan to use rxvt (quite common...) you could also
306 replace the rxvt terminfo file with the rxvt-unicode one.
307
308 "tic" outputs some error when compiling the terminfo entry.
309 Most likely it's the empty definition for "enacs=". Just replace it
310 by "enacs=\E[0@" and try again.
311
312 "bash"'s readline does not work correctly under rxvt.
313 I need a termcap file entry.
314 One reason you might want this is that some distributions or
315 operating systems still compile some programs using the
316 long-obsoleted termcap library (Fedora Core's bash is one example)
317 and rely on a termcap entry for "rxvt-unicode".
318
319 You could use rxvt's termcap entry with resonable results in many
320 cases. You can also create a termcap entry by using terminfo's
321 infocmp program like this:
322
323 infocmp -C rxvt-unicode
324
325 Or you could use this termcap entry, generated by the command above:
326
327 rxvt-unicode|rxvt-unicode terminal (X Window System):\
328 :am:bw:eo:km:mi:ms:xn:xo:\
329 :co#80:it#8:li#24:lm#0:\
330 :AL=\E[%dL:DC=\E[%dP:DL=\E[%dM:DO=\E[%dB:IC=\E[%d@:\
331 :K1=\EOw:K2=\EOu:K3=\EOy:K4=\EOq:K5=\EOs:LE=\E[%dD:\
332 :RI=\E[%dC:SF=\E[%dS:SR=\E[%dT:UP=\E[%dA:ae=\E(B:al=\E[L:\
333 :as=\E(0:bl=^G:cd=\E[J:ce=\E[K:cl=\E[H\E[2J:\
334 :cm=\E[%i%d;%dH:cr=^M:cs=\E[%i%d;%dr:ct=\E[3g:dc=\E[P:\
335 :dl=\E[M:do=^J:ec=\E[%dX:ei=\E[4l:ho=\E[H:\
336 :i1=\E[?47l\E=\E[?1l:ic=\E[@:im=\E[4h:\
337 :is=\E[r\E[m\E[2J\E[H\E[?7h\E[?1;3;4;6l\E[4l:\
338 :k1=\E[11~:k2=\E[12~:k3=\E[13~:k4=\E[14~:k5=\E[15~:\
339 :k6=\E[17~:k7=\E[18~:k8=\E[19~:k9=\E[20~:kD=\E[3~:\
340 :kI=\E[2~:kN=\E[6~:kP=\E[5~:kb=\177:kd=\EOB:ke=\E[?1l\E>:\
341 :kh=\E[7~:kl=\EOD:kr=\EOC:ks=\E[?1h\E=:ku=\EOA:le=^H:\
342 :mb=\E[5m:md=\E[1m:me=\E[m\017:mr=\E[7m:nd=\E[C:rc=\E8:\
343 :sc=\E7:se=\E[27m:sf=^J:so=\E[7m:sr=\EM:st=\EH:ta=^I:\
344 :te=\E[r\E[?1049l:ti=\E[?1049h:ue=\E[24m:up=\E[A:\
345 :us=\E[4m:vb=\E[?5h\E[?5l:ve=\E[?25h:vi=\E[?25l:\
346 :vs=\E[?25h:
347
348 Why does "ls" no longer have coloured output?
349 The "ls" in the GNU coreutils unfortunately doesn't use terminfo to
350 decide wether a terminal has colour, but uses it's own configuration
351 file. Needless to say, "rxvt-unicode" is not in it's default file
352 (among with most other terminals supporting colour). Either add:
353
354 TERM rxvt-unicode
355
356 to "/etc/DIR_COLORS" or simply add:
357
358 alias ls='ls --color=auto'
359
360 to your ".profile" or ".bashrc".
361
362 Why doesn't vim/emacs etc. use the 88 colour mode?
363 Why doesn't vim/emacs etc. make use of italic?
364 Why are the secondary screen-related options not working properly?
365 Make sure you are using "TERM=rxvt-unicode". Some pre-packaged
366 distributions (most notably Debian GNU/Linux) break rxvt-unicode by
367 setting "TERM" to "rxvt", which doesn't have these extra features.
368 Unfortunately, some of these (most notably, again, Debian GNU/Linux)
369 furthermore fail to even install the "rxvt-unicode" terminfo file,
370 so you will need to install it on your own (See the question When I
371 log-in to another system it tells me about missing terminfo data? on
372 how to do this).
373
374 My numerical keypad acts weird and generates differing output?
375 Some Debian GNUL/Linux users seem to have this problem, although no
376 specific details were reported so far. It is possible that this is
377 caused by the wrong "TERM" setting, although the details of wether
378 and how this can happen are unknown, as "TERM=rxvt" should offer a
379 compatible keymap. See the answer to the previous question, and
380 please report if that helped.
381
382 Rxvt-unicode does not seem to understand the selected encoding?
383 Unicode does not seem to work?
384 If you encounter strange problems like typing an accented character
385 but getting two unrelated other characters or similar, or if program
386 output is subtly garbled, then you should check your locale
387 settings.
388
389 Rxvt-unicode must be started with the same "LC_CTYPE" setting as the
390 programs. Often rxvt-unicode is started in the "C" locale, while the
391 login script running within the rxvt-unicode window changes the
392 locale to something else, e.g. "en_GB.UTF-8". Needless to say, this
393 is not going to work.
394
395 The best thing is to fix your startup environment, as you will
396 likely run into other problems. If nothing works you can try this in
397 your .profile.
398
399 printf '\e]701;%s\007' "$LC_CTYPE"
400
401 If this doesn't work, then maybe you use a "LC_CTYPE" specification
402 not supported on your systems. Some systems have a "locale" command
403 which displays this (also, "perl -e0" can be used to check locale
404 settings, as it will complain loudly if it cannot set the locale).
405 If it displays something like:
406
407 locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: ...
408
409 Then the locale you specified is not supported on your system.
410
411 If nothing works and you are sure that everything is set correctly
412 then you will need to remember a little known fact: Some programs
413 just don't support locales :(
414
415 Why do some characters look so much different than others?
416 How does rxvt-unicode choose fonts?
417 Most fonts do not contain the full range of Unicode, which is fine.
418 Chances are that the font you (or the admin/package maintainer of
419 your system/os) have specified does not cover all the characters you
420 want to display.
421
422 rxvt-unicode makes a best-effort try at finding a replacement font.
423 Often the result is fine, but sometimes the chosen font looks
424 bad/ugly/wrong. Some fonts have totally strange characters that
425 don't resemble the correct glyph at all, and rxvt-unicode lacks the
426 artificial intelligence to detect that a specific glyph is wrong: it
427 has to believe the font that the characters it claims to contain
428 indeed look correct.
429
430 In that case, select a font of your taste and add it to the font
431 list, e.g.:
432
433 rxvt -fn basefont,font2,font3...
434
435 When rxvt-unicode sees a character, it will first look at the base
436 font. If the base font does not contain the character, it will go to
437 the next font, and so on. Specifying your own fonts will also speed
438 up this search and use less resources within rxvt-unicode and the
439 X-server.
440
441 The only limitation is that none of the fonts may be larger than the
442 base font, as the base font defines the terminal character cell
443 size, which must be the same due to the way terminals work.
444
445 Why do some chinese characters look so different than others?
446 This is because there is a difference between script and language --
447 rxvt-unicode does not know which language the text that is output
448 is, as it only knows the unicode character codes. If rxvt-unicode
449 first sees a japanese/chinese character, it might choose a japanese
450 font for display. Subsequent japanese characters will use that font.
451 Now, many chinese characters aren't represented in japanese fonts,
452 so when the first non-japanese character comes up, rxvt-unicode will
453 look for a chinese font -- unfortunately at this point, it will
454 still use the japanese font for chinese characters that are also in
455 the japanese font.
456
457 The workaround is easy: just tag a chinese font at the end of your
458 font list (see the previous question). The key is to view the font
459 list as a preference list: If you expect more japanese, list a
460 japanese font first. If you expect more chinese, put a chinese font
461 first.
462
463 In the future it might be possible to switch language preferences at
464 runtime (the internal data structure has no problem with using
465 different fonts for the same character at the same time, but no
466 interface for this has been designed yet).
467
468 Until then, you might get away with switching fonts at runtime (see
469 "Can I switch the fonts at runtime?" later in this document).
470
471 Why does rxvt-unicode sometimes leave pixel droppings?
472 Most fonts were not designed for terminal use, which means that
473 character size varies a lot. A font that is otherwise fine for
474 terminal use might contain some characters that are simply too wide.
475 Rxvt-unicode will avoid these characters. For characters that are
476 just "a bit" too wide a special "careful" rendering mode is used
477 that redraws adjacent characters.
478
479 All of this requires that fonts do not lie about character sizes,
480 however: Xft fonts often draw glyphs larger than their acclaimed
481 bounding box, and rxvt-unicode has no way of detecting this (the
482 correct way is to ask for the character bounding box, which
483 unfortunately is wrong in these cases).
484
485 It's not clear (to me at least), wether this is a bug in Xft,
486 freetype, or the respective font. If you encounter this problem you
487 might try using the "-lsp" option to give the font more height. If
488 that doesn't work, you might be forced to use a different font.
489
490 All of this is not a problem when using X11 core fonts, as their
491 bounding box data is correct.
492
493 On Solaris 9, many line-drawing characters are too wide.
494 Seems to be a known bug, read
495 <http://nixdoc.net/files/forum/about34198.html>. Some people use the
496 following ugly workaround to get non-double-wide-characters working:
497
498 #define wcwidth(x) wcwidth(x) > 1 ? 1 : wcwidth(x)
499
500 My Compose (Multi_key) key is no longer working.
501 The most common causes for this are that either your locale is not
502 set correctly, or you specified a preeditStyle that is not supported
503 by your input method. For example, if you specified OverTheSpot and
504 your input method (e.g. the default input method handling Compose
505 keys) does not support this (for instance because it is not visual),
506 then rxvt-unicode will continue without an input method.
507
508 In this case either do not specify a preeditStyle or specify more
509 than one pre-edit style, such as OverTheSpot,Root,None.
510
511 I cannot type "Ctrl-Shift-2" to get an ASCII NUL character due to ISO
512 14755
513 Either try "Ctrl-2" alone (it often is mapped to ASCII NUL even on
514 international keyboards) or simply use ISO 14755 support to your
515 advantage, typing <Ctrl-Shift-0> to get a ASCII NUL. This works for
516 other codes, too, such as "Ctrl-Shift-1-d" to type the default
517 telnet escape character and so on.
518
519 How can I keep rxvt-unicode from using reverse video so much?
520 First of all, make sure you are running with the right terminal
521 settings ("TERM=rxvt-unicode"), which will get rid of most of these
522 effects. Then make sure you have specified colours for italic and
523 bold, as otherwise rxvt-unicode might use reverse video to simulate
524 the effect:
525
526 URxvt.colorBD: white
527 URxvt.colorIT: green
528
529 Some programs assume totally weird colours (red instead of blue), how
530 can I fix that?
531 For some unexplainable reason, some rare programs assume a very
532 weird colour palette when confronted with a terminal with more than
533 the standard 8 colours (rxvt-unicode supports 88). The right fix is,
534 of course, to fix these programs not to assume non-ISO colours
535 without very good reasons.
536
537 In the meantime, you can either edit your "rxvt-unicode" terminfo
538 definition to only claim 8 colour support or use "TERM=rxvt", which
539 will fix colours but keep you from using other rxvt-unicode
540 features.
541
542 I am on FreeBSD and rxvt-unicode does not seem to work at all.
543 Rxvt-unicode requires the symbol "__STDC_ISO_10646__" to be defined
544 in your compile environment, or an implementation that implements
545 it, wether it defines the symbol or not. "__STDC_ISO_10646__"
546 requires that wchar_t is represented as unicode.
547
548 As you might have guessed, FreeBSD does neither define this symobl
549 nor does it support it. Instead, it uses it's own internal
550 representation of wchar_t. This is, of course, completely fine with
551 respect to standards.
552
553 However, that means rxvt-unicode only works in "POSIX", "ISO-8859-1"
554 and "UTF-8" locales under FreeBSD (which all use Unicode as wchar_t.
555
556 "__STDC_ISO_10646__" is the only sane way to support multi-language
557 apps in an OS, as using a locale-dependent (and non-standardized)
558 representation of wchar_t makes it impossible to convert between
559 wchar_t (as used by X11 and your applications) and any other
560 encoding without implementing OS-specific-wrappers for each and
561 every locale. There simply are no APIs to convert wchar_t into
562 anything except the current locale encoding.
563
564 Some applications (such as the formidable mlterm) work around this
565 by carrying their own replacement functions for character set
566 handling with them, and either implementing OS-dependent hacks or
567 doing multiple conversions (which is slow and unreliable in case the
568 OS implements encodings slightly different than the terminal
569 emulator).
570
571 The rxvt-unicode author insists that the right way to fix this is in
572 the system libraries once and for all, instead of forcing every app
573 to carry complete replacements for them :)
574
575 I use Solaris 9 and it doesn't compile/work/etc.
576 Try the diff in doc/solaris9.patch as a base. It fixes the worst
577 problems with "wcwidth" and a compile problem.
578
579 How can I use rxvt-unicode under cygwin?
580 rxvt-unicode should compile and run out of the box on cygwin, using
581 the X11 libraries that come with cygwin. libW11 emulation is no
582 longer supported (and makes no sense, either, as it only supported a
583 single font). I recommend starting the X-server in "-multiwindow" or
584 "-rootless" mode instead, which will result in similar look&feel as
585 the old libW11 emulation.
586
587 At the time of this writing, cygwin didn't seem to support any
588 multi-byte encodings (you might try "LC_CTYPE=C-UTF-8"), so you are
589 likely limited to 8-bit encodings.
590
591 How does rxvt-unicode determine the encoding to use?
592 Is there an option to switch encodings?
593 Unlike some other terminals, rxvt-unicode has no encoding switch,
594 and no specific "utf-8" mode, such as xterm. In fact, it doesn't
595 even know about UTF-8 or any other encodings with respect to
596 terminal I/O.
597
598 The reasons is that there exists a perfectly fine mechanism for
599 selecting the encoding, doing I/O and (most important) communicating
600 this to all applications so everybody agrees on character properties
601 such as width and code number. This mechanism is the *locale*.
602 Applications not using that info will have problems (for example,
603 "xterm" gets the width of characters wrong as it uses it's own,
604 locale-independent table under all locales).
605
606 Rxvt-unicode uses the "LC_CTYPE" locale category to select encoding.
607 All programs doing the same (that is, most) will automatically agree
608 in the interpretation of characters.
609
610 Unfortunately, there is no system-independent way to select locales,
611 nor is there a standard on how locale specifiers will look like.
612
613 On most systems, the content of the "LC_CTYPE" environment variable
614 contains an arbitrary string which corresponds to an
615 already-installed locale. Common names for locales are
616 "en_US.UTF-8", "de_DE.ISO-8859-15", "ja_JP.EUC-JP", i.e.
617 "language_country.encoding", but other forms (i.e. "de" or "german")
618 are also common.
619
620 Rxvt-unicode ignores all other locale categories, and except for the
621 encoding, ignores country or language-specific settings, i.e.
622 "de_DE.UTF-8" and "ja_JP.UTF-8" are the normally same to
623 rxvt-unicode.
624
625 If you want to use a specific encoding you have to make sure you
626 start rxvt-unicode with the correct "LC_CTYPE" category.
627
628 Can I switch locales at runtime?
629 Yes, using an escape sequence. Try something like this, which sets
630 rxvt-unicode's idea of "LC_CTYPE".
631
632 printf '\e]701;%s\007' ja_JP.SJIS
633
634 See also the previous answer.
635
636 Sometimes this capability is rather handy when you want to work in
637 one locale (e.g. "de_DE.UTF-8") but some programs don't support it
638 (e.g. UTF-8). For example, I use this script to start "xjdic", which
639 first switches to a locale supported by xjdic and back later:
640
641 printf '\e]701;%s\007' ja_JP.SJIS
642 xjdic -js
643 printf '\e]701;%s\007' de_DE.UTF-8
644
645 You can also use xterm's "luit" program, which usually works fine,
646 except for some locales where character width differs between
647 program- and rxvt-unicode-locales.
648
649 Can I switch the fonts at runtime?
650 Yes, using an escape sequence. Try something like this, which has
651 the same effect as using the "-fn" switch, and takes effect
652 immediately:
653
654 printf '\e]50;%s\007' "9x15bold,xft:Kochi Gothic"
655
656 This is useful if you e.g. work primarily with japanese (and prefer
657 a japanese font), but you have to switch to chinese temporarily,
658 where japanese fonts would only be in your way.
659
660 You can think of this as a kind of manual ISO-2022 switching.
661
662 Why do italic characters look as if clipped?
663 Many fonts have difficulties with italic characters and hinting. For
664 example, the otherwise very nicely hinted font "xft:Bitstream Vera
665 Sans Mono" completely fails in it's italic face. A workaround might
666 be to enable freetype autohinting, i.e. like this:
667
668 URxvt.italicFont: xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:italic:autohint=true
669 URxvt.boldItalicFont: xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:bold:italic:autohint=true
670
671 My input method wants <some encoding> but I want UTF-8, what can I do?
672 You can specify separate locales for the input method and the rest
673 of the terminal, using the resource "imlocale":
674
675 URxvt.imlocale: ja_JP.EUC-JP
676
677 Now you can start your terminal with "LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8" and
678 still use your input method. Please note, however, that you will not
679 be able to input characters outside "EUC-JP" in a normal way then,
680 as your input method limits you.
681
682 Rxvt-unicode crashes when the X Input Method changes or exits.
683 Unfortunately, this is unavoidable, as the XIM protocol is racy by
684 design. Applications can avoid some crashes at the expense of memory
685 leaks, and Input Methods can avoid some crashes by careful ordering
686 at exit time. kinput2 (and derived input methods) generally
687 succeeds, while SCIM (or similar input methods) fails. In the end,
688 however, crashes cannot be completely avoided even if both sides
689 cooperate.
690
691 So the only workaround is not to kill your Input Method Servers.
692
693 Rxvt-unicode uses gobs of memory, how can I reduce that?
694 Rxvt-unicode tries to obey the rule of not charging you for
695 something you don't use. One thing you should try is to configure
696 out all settings that you don't need, for example, Xft support is a
697 resource hog by design, when used. Compiling it out ensures that no
698 Xft font will be loaded accidentally when rxvt-unicode tries to find
699 a font for your characters.
700
701 Also, many people (me included) like large windows and even larger
702 scrollback buffers: Without "--enable-unicode3", rxvt-unicode will
703 use 6 bytes per screen cell. For a 160x?? window this amounts to
704 almost a kilobyte per line. A scrollback buffer of 10000 lines will
705 then (if full) use 10 Megabytes of memory. With "--enable-unicode3"
706 it gets worse, as rxvt-unicode then uses 8 bytes per screen cell.
707
708 Can I speed up Xft rendering somehow?
709 Yes, the most obvious way to speed it up is to avoid Xft entirely,
710 as it is simply slow. If you still want Xft fonts you might try to
711 disable antialiasing (by appending ":antialias=false"), which saves
712 lots of memory and also speeds up rendering considerably.
713
714 Rxvt-unicode doesn't seem to anti-alias its fonts, what is wrong?
715 Rxvt-unicode will use whatever you specify as a font. If it needs to
716 fall back to it's default font search list it will prefer X11 core
717 fonts, because they are small and fast, and then use Xft fonts. It
718 has antialiasing disabled for most of them, because the author
719 thinks they look best that way.
720
721 If you want antialiasing, you have to specify the fonts manually.
722
723 Mouse cut/paste suddenly no longer works.
724 Make sure that mouse reporting is actually turned off since killing
725 some editors prematurely may leave the mouse in mouse report mode.
726 I've heard that tcsh may use mouse reporting unless it otherwise
727 specified. A quick check is to see if cut/paste works when the Alt
728 or Shift keys are depressed.
729
730 What's with this bold/blink stuff?
731 If no bold colour is set via "colorBD:", bold will invert text using
732 the standard foreground colour.
733
734 For the standard background colour, blinking will actually make the
735 text blink when compiled with "--enable-blinking". with standard
736 colours. Without "--enable-blinking", the blink attribute will be
737 ignored.
738
739 On ANSI colours, bold/blink attributes are used to set
740 high-intensity foreground/background colors.
741
742 color0-7 are the low-intensity colors.
743
744 color8-15 are the corresponding high-intensity colors.
745
746 I don't like the screen colors. How do I change them?
747 You can change the screen colors at run-time using ~/.Xdefaults
748 resources (or as long-options).
749
750 Here are values that are supposed to resemble a VGA screen,
751 including the murky brown that passes for low-intensity yellow:
752
753 URxvt.color0: #000000
754 URxvt.color1: #A80000
755 URxvt.color2: #00A800
756 URxvt.color3: #A8A800
757 URxvt.color4: #0000A8
758 URxvt.color5: #A800A8
759 URxvt.color6: #00A8A8
760 URxvt.color7: #A8A8A8
761
762 URxvt.color8: #000054
763 URxvt.color9: #FF0054
764 URxvt.color10: #00FF54
765 URxvt.color11: #FFFF54
766 URxvt.color12: #0000FF
767 URxvt.color13: #FF00FF
768 URxvt.color14: #00FFFF
769 URxvt.color15: #FFFFFF
770
771 And here is a more complete set of non-standard colors described
772 (not by me) as "pretty girly".
773
774 URxvt.cursorColor: #dc74d1
775 URxvt.pointerColor: #dc74d1
776 URxvt.background: #0e0e0e
777 URxvt.foreground: #4ad5e1
778 URxvt.color0: #000000
779 URxvt.color8: #8b8f93
780 URxvt.color1: #dc74d1
781 URxvt.color9: #dc74d1
782 URxvt.color2: #0eb8c7
783 URxvt.color10: #0eb8c7
784 URxvt.color3: #dfe37e
785 URxvt.color11: #dfe37e
786 URxvt.color5: #9e88f0
787 URxvt.color13: #9e88f0
788 URxvt.color6: #73f7ff
789 URxvt.color14: #73f7ff
790 URxvt.color7: #e1dddd
791 URxvt.color15: #e1dddd
792
793 How can I start rxvtd in a race-free way?
794 Try "rxvtd -f -o", which tells rxvtd to open the display, create the
795 listening socket and then fork.
796
797 What's with the strange Backspace/Delete key behaviour?
798 Assuming that the physical Backspace key corresponds to the
799 BackSpace keysym (not likely for Linux ... see the following
800 question) there are two standard values that can be used for
801 Backspace: "^H" and "^?".
802
803 Historically, either value is correct, but rxvt-unicode adopts the
804 debian policy of using "^?" when unsure, because it's the one only
805 only correct choice :).
806
807 Rxvt-unicode tries to inherit the current stty settings and uses the
808 value of `erase' to guess the value for backspace. If rxvt-unicode
809 wasn't started from a terminal (say, from a menu or by remote
810 shell), then the system value of `erase', which corresponds to
811 CERASE in <termios.h>, will be used (which may not be the same as
812 your stty setting).
813
814 For starting a new rxvt-unicode:
815
816 # use Backspace = ^H
817 $ stty erase ^H
818 $ rxvt
819
820 # use Backspace = ^?
821 $ stty erase ^?
822 $ rxvt
823
824 Toggle with "ESC [ 36 h" / "ESC [ 36 l".
825
826 For an existing rxvt-unicode:
827
828 # use Backspace = ^H
829 $ stty erase ^H
830 $ echo -n "^[[36h"
831
832 # use Backspace = ^?
833 $ stty erase ^?
834 $ echo -n "^[[36l"
835
836 This helps satisfy some of the Backspace discrepancies that occur,
837 but if you use Backspace = "^H", make sure that the termcap/terminfo
838 value properly reflects that.
839
840 The Delete key is a another casualty of the ill-defined Backspace
841 problem. To avoid confusion between the Backspace and Delete keys,
842 the Delete key has been assigned an escape sequence to match the
843 vt100 for Execute ("ESC [ 3 ~") and is in the supplied
844 termcap/terminfo.
845
846 Some other Backspace problems:
847
848 some editors use termcap/terminfo, some editors (vim I'm told)
849 expect Backspace = ^H, GNU Emacs (and Emacs-like editors) use ^H for
850 help.
851
852 Perhaps someday this will all be resolved in a consistent manner.
853
854 I don't like the key-bindings. How do I change them?
855 There are some compile-time selections available via configure.
856 Unless you have run "configure" with the "--disable-resources"
857 option you can use the `keysym' resource to alter the keystrings
858 associated with keysyms.
859
860 Here's an example for a URxvt session started using "rxvt -name
861 URxvt"
862
863 URxvt.keysym.Home: \033[1~
864 URxvt.keysym.End: \033[4~
865 URxvt.keysym.C-apostrophe: \033<C-'>
866 URxvt.keysym.C-slash: \033<C-/>
867 URxvt.keysym.C-semicolon: \033<C-;>
868 URxvt.keysym.C-grave: \033<C-`>
869 URxvt.keysym.C-comma: \033<C-,>
870 URxvt.keysym.C-period: \033<C-.>
871 URxvt.keysym.C-0x60: \033<C-`>
872 URxvt.keysym.C-Tab: \033<C-Tab>
873 URxvt.keysym.C-Return: \033<C-Return>
874 URxvt.keysym.S-Return: \033<S-Return>
875 URxvt.keysym.S-space: \033<S-Space>
876 URxvt.keysym.M-Up: \033<M-Up>
877 URxvt.keysym.M-Down: \033<M-Down>
878 URxvt.keysym.M-Left: \033<M-Left>
879 URxvt.keysym.M-Right: \033<M-Right>
880 URxvt.keysym.M-C-0: list \033<M-C- 0123456789 >
881 URxvt.keysym.M-C-a: list \033<M-C- abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz >
882 URxvt.keysym.F12: command:\033]701;zh_CN.GBK\007
883
884 See some more examples in the documentation for the keysym resource.
885
886 I'm using keyboard model XXX that has extra Prior/Next/Insert keys. How
887 do I make use of them? For example, the Sun Keyboard type 4 has the
888 following mappings that rxvt-unicode doesn't recognize.
889 KP_Insert == Insert
890 F22 == Print
891 F27 == Home
892 F29 == Prior
893 F33 == End
894 F35 == Next
895
896 Rather than have rxvt-unicode try to accommodate all the various
897 possible keyboard mappings, it is better to use `xmodmap' to remap
898 the keys as required for your particular machine.
899
900 How do I distinguish wether I'm running rxvt-unicode or a regular xterm?
901 I need this to decide about setting colors etc.
902 rxvt and rxvt-unicode always export the variable "COLORTERM", so you
903 can check and see if that is set. Note that several programs, JED,
904 slrn, Midnight Commander automatically check this variable to decide
905 whether or not to use color.
906
907 How do I set the correct, full IP address for the DISPLAY variable?
908 If you've compiled rxvt-unicode with DISPLAY_IS_IP and have enabled
909 insecure mode then it is possible to use the following shell script
910 snippets to correctly set the display. If your version of
911 rxvt-unicode wasn't also compiled with ESCZ_ANSWER (as assumed in
912 these snippets) then the COLORTERM variable can be used to
913 distinguish rxvt-unicode from a regular xterm.
914
915 Courtesy of Chuck Blake <cblake@BBN.COM> with the following shell
916 script snippets:
917
918 # Bourne/Korn/POSIX family of shells:
919 [ ${TERM:-foo} = foo ] && TERM=xterm # assume an xterm if we don't know
920 if [ ${TERM:-foo} = xterm ]; then
921 stty -icanon -echo min 0 time 15 # see if enhanced rxvt or not
922 echo -n '^[Z'
923 read term_id
924 stty icanon echo
925 if [ ""${term_id} = '^[[?1;2C' -a ${DISPLAY:-foo} = foo ]; then
926 echo -n '^[[7n' # query the rxvt we are in for the DISPLAY string
927 read DISPLAY # set it in our local shell
928 fi
929 fi
930
931 How do I compile the manual pages for myself?
932 You need to have a recent version of perl installed as
933 /usr/bin/perl, one that comes with pod2man, pod2text and pod2html.
934 Then go to the doc subdirectory and enter "make alldoc".
935
936 My question isn't answered here, can I ask a human?
937 Before sending me mail, you could go to IRC: "irc.freenode.net",
938 channel "#rxvt-unicode" has some rxvt-unicode enthusiasts that might
939 be interested in learning about new and exciting problems (but not
940 FAQs :).
941