URxvt: Pros and cons

After getting fed up with Yakuake‘s bloat, Yeahconsole‘s broken embedding, and Tilda‘s flickering, broken scrollbar, and broken URL handling, I decided to try URxvt, since it has a Perl extension that’ll turn it into a slide-down terminal without being embedded in Yeahconsole.

(And because stjerm, though well-recommended by some, is the name of two seemingly independent Google Code projects and somehow feels just a touch shady to me)

After a few days of intermittent fiddling, my reactions were mixed:

Pros	Cons
Like XTerm, an order of magnitude lighter and more responsive than anything else out there.	Like XTerm, terribly documented by 2011 standards for something you must personalize heavily.^[1]
Extensible in Perl	Extensible in Perl
Has a URL-recognizer (unlike XTerm) and opens unselected URLs with one middle-click.	You can’t amend the context menu for selected text via the config file. You need Perl.
Beautifully accurate “smart selection” plugin	Needed Perl hackery and `/usr/bin/xclip` just to rebind Copy/Paste keys.
Elegant ISO 14755 Unicode codepoint input support	ISO 14755 breaks Ctrl+Shift+C/V clipboard bindings.
Backspace and Ctrl+Backspace produce distinct keycodes by default	URxvt’s default Ctrl+Backspace is the only XTerm Backspace that termcap/terminfo gives to vim/man on my machine so I had to rebind anyway to stay compatible.
I love the “plain” scrollbar style	No way to feed the scrollback buffer with `secondaryScroll` but hide the scrollbar when vim makes it un-clickable.
Doesn’t flicker like VTE-based terminals Unbeatable font support	Yet another set of Ctrl+Up/Down, Home/End, etc. keycodes needed in in my .zshrc. Keybinds alias to other keys like in Vim, not to internal functions like in XTerm.

Nonetheless, it’s generally a decent terminal and I’ve switched to its kuake Perl extension. It has its warts but, so far, I get the impression that URxvt’s warts won’t bother me as much as XTerm’s warts do.

Still, I did almost gave up on it several times before I stumbled on the little fix I needed and, if I weren’t procrastinating something else right now, I probably would have given up. In case anyone wants it for reference purposes, my URxvt config is up on GitHub.

^1. Manpages seem to be the source format and, even with table-of-contents generation and hyperlinking for the manpage cross-references in HTML and texinfo converters, it still involves a lot of fumbling, fiddling, and Ctrl+F-ing within too-long pages where there are no links direct to the relevant sections and quite a few “See the …” references which aren’t hyperlinked and don’t give any clue where to look for the materials suggested.

URxvt: Pros and cons by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.