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Revision: 1.38
Committed: Tue Jan 31 01:42:21 2006 UTC (18 years, 3 months ago) by root
Branch: MAIN
CVS Tags: rel-7_5
Changes since 1.37: +21 -15 lines
Log Message:
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File Contents

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