Don't dismiss rxvt too quickly [LWN.net]

Don't dismiss rxvt too quickly

Posted Jun 4, 2004 21:43 UTC (Fri) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

I agree that rxvt is long in the tooth, but don't discount it so quickly. In fact, the features you like (in particular the Athena scrollbar, which I wholeheartedly agree is the best scrollbar ever invented in terms of functionality--even if it looks very dated) are definitely still there!

Rxvt has a whole plethora of configuration options, so many that most distros just pick one or two of the "most popular" (which usually means whatever the person packaging it thinks--often enabling as much stuff as possible) and package those up. If you get the rxvt source distribution and build it yourself (which doesn't take more than a few minutes) you can get a very workable xterm emulator without the extra cruft you don't like, and still be able to add in just things you do like. Examples of available options, in addition to the X scrollbar, include 256 colors, transparency, XPM backgrounds, menubar, handling for X resources, mousewheel support, etc. Even utmp/wtmp population.

Also, I find it very stable; I've used rxvt for years and years, since the days when it was bundled with fvwm.

In my environment I use _tons_ of rxvt's. I use the window manager's menus to choose them. Tabbed browsing seems cool, but my setup is very customized so that I have buttons that invoke rxvt's which do all kinds of special things like log into remote hosts, set to special environments, etc. I don't know how to connect my buttons up to gnome-terminal with some kind of remote command to tell it to create a new tab in some particular instance, containing a session with specific characteristics. Finally, in my experience as with other comments here, the new emulators tend to have redisplay and scrolling that's far too slow.

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Xaw style scrollbar for rxvt

Posted Jun 4, 2004 23:29 UTC (Fri) by donio (guest, #94) [Link] (1 responses)

Put this in your .Xdefaults (and do xrdb -merge .Xdefaults if needed):

rxvt.scrollstyle: xterm

Some other settings I use:

rxvt.background: Black
rxvt.foreground: White
rxvt.saveLines: 2000
rxvt.keysym.0xFFFF: \177
rxvt.cutchars: `"'%&()*,;<>@[]{|}
rxvt.print-pipe: "cat >$HOME/rxvt.print"
rxvt.termName: xterm

rxvt.mouseWheelScrollPage: true
rxvt.scrollTtyOutput: false
rxvt.scrollTtyKeypress: true
rxvt.scrollWithBuffer: true
rxvt.scrollstyle: xterm

rxvt.font: -*-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*

rxvt is still the best!

Xaw style scrollbar for rxvt

Posted Jun 6, 2004 1:29 UTC (Sun) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Personally, I loathe xdefaults. Thanks to all the application-specific weirdness, they have cost me far more time than they have ever saved me. I use rxvt too, but I just have my launch button launch this command:

/usr/bin/rxvt -rv -sr -font 1 -vb -si -sk -sl 1000

This, plus changing the color for directories from dark blue to bright yellow, leads to terminal bliss. (to change directory colors, use DIR 01;33, see dircolors(1) for how)