de:urxvt ja:Rxvt-unicode ru:Rxvt-unicode zh-hans:Rxvt-unicode

rxvt-unicode (urxvt) is a terminal emulator forked from rxvt, customizable with source-code patches, #X resources and #Perl extensions.

Installation

Install one of the following:

• rxvt-unicode,

• rxvt-unicode-truecolor-wide-glyphs — improved font rendering, enhanced glyph support, applied True color support,

or search Arch User Repository for opinionated builds with different patches and configuration options applied.

Configuration

X resources

Rxvt-unicode is controlled by command-line arguments or X resources. Command-line arguments override, and take precedence over resource settings.

The first component of a resource is either the class—URxvt—or an application (instance) name. Application name can be specified with urxvt(1) command-line option and is set to urxvt—a binary basename(1)—by default. For a given instance, resources defined with an application name override, and take precedence over defined with the class name ones.

See urxvt(1) and urxvt(7) for available settings, X resources and values. Also urxvt --help prints all available resources to the standard error. Each resource can be used as a long command-line option.

Use xrdb(1)—provided by the xorg-xrdb package—to apply the configuration: xrdb ~/.Xresources.

Fonts

Rxvt-unicode does not utilize fontconfig library for font substitution when a font or individual character is not present. I.e. you must provide all font names in the corresponding resources—set the fontsets—for all glyphss you are interested in.

Rxvt-unicode supports both X FreeType (Xft) and X Logical Font Description (XLFD); urclock(1) supports XLFD only.

Permanent

URxvt.font:           xft:Input Mono:size13:styleRegular,\
                      xft:Font Awesome 6 Free:styleSolid
URxvt.boldFont:       xft:Input Mono:size13:styleMedium
URxvt.italicFont:     xft:Input Mono:size13:styleItalic
URxvt.boldItalicFont: xft:Input Mono:size13:styleMedium Italic

~/.Xresources

Non-permanent

You can change the fonts of the current instance with Operating System Command (OSC) sequences. Use numeric (Ps) parameters 710–713 followed by corresponding text (Pt) parameter, such as:

$ printf '\x1b\x5d710;%s\x1b\x5c' "xft:Terminus:pixelsize=22"
$ printf      '\e]711;%s\a'       "xft:Terminus:pixelsize=22:bold"

See also:

• urxvt(1)

• urxvt(7)

• Despite the manual page section name, some of OSC sequences presented in that section are not recognized by xterm.

To change font size of the current instance with keyboard shortcuts use resize-font Perl extension.

Spacing

You may need to tweak the horizontal distance between characters with letterSpace and/or the vertical distance between rows with urxvt(1). These needs depend on:

• using rendering improvement patches, like enable-wide-glyphs.patch, improve-font-rendering.patch, font-width-fix.patch or line-spacing-fix.patch,

• using languages with glyphs that are too different from English letters, like Arabian, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese or Korean,

• your font and its size.

Scrollback buffer

Behavior on receiving new output

By default, when shell output appears, the scrollback view will automatically jump to the bottom of the buffer to display new output.

If you want to see previous output (e.g., compiler messages) while pseudo-TTY is still receiving new lines, and jump to the bottom of the scrollback buffer on key press, use the following options:

URxvt.scrollTtyOutput:   False
URxvt.scrollWithBuffer:  True
URxvt.scrollTtyKeypress: True

Secondary screen

When you scroll a pager in a secondary screen (e.g. using less(1) without the -X/--no-init option), it may be a good idea to disable secondary screen scroll to be able to scroll in the pager itself, instead of the terminal's buffer.

This is default and unchangeable behavior in Konsole and VTE-based terminal emulators. To achieve the same behavior in urxvt, use the following:

URxvt.secondaryScroll: False

The above configuration works as expected, except when scrolling with a mouse wheel. When you scroll a pager in the secondary screen with the mouse wheel, and there has been something in the scrollback buffer — the scrollback buffer will be scrolled by the mouse wheel, instead of the pager itself.

To solve this issue, it is necessary to introduce a new option into urxvt. Use packages like rxvt-unicode-better-wheel-scrolling-unicode3 or rxvt-unicode-fontspacing-noinc-vteclear-secondarywheel , or apply secondaryWheel.patch. After installing, set the following:

URxvt.secondaryWheel: True

Clearance

Reset to Initial State (RIS) ESC 06/03 empties the screen and the scrollback buffer. You can bind it to your desired keys like so:

URxvt.keysym.Meta-Control-l: command:\033c

Keeping the screen content on screen clearance

In urxvt pressing Control-L empties the screen, and the screen content is thrown away — you cannot see it in the scrollback buffer later. This behavior might seems controversial for users with Konsole or VTE-based terminal emulators experience, where Control-L keeps the screen content in the scrollback buffer.

To achieve such VTE-like behavior in urxvt you can use appropriate package like rxvt-unicode-better-wheel-scrolling-unicode3 or rxvt-unicode-fontspacing-noinc-vteclear-secondarywheel, or apply clear.patch in your preferred build.

Scrollbar

Scrollbar look and feel is controlled by a dozen of resources. Look at the manual around urxvt(1) and urxvt(1) resources, and see urxvt(1) section.

You can also change visibility of scrollbar on the fly for the current instance with DEC Private Modes urxvt(7) (Pm 30). For example, you can bind scrollbar visibility toggling to a keyboard shortcut:

URxvt.keysym.Meta-Control-s: command:\033[?30t

Saving to a file

Ctrl-Print or Shift-Print saves the scrollback buffer content to a file with a setting like so:

URxvt.print-pipe: cat > ~/Downloads/URxvt_$(date '+%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S').txt

• Print is usually the Print Screen key.

• Print alone saves the screen without the scrollback buffer.

Clipboard

Rxvt-unicode clipboard behavior might seem controversy for people without xterm background. See urxvt(1) for details.

You can use urxvt-eval(1) with key bindings to setup copying to and pasting from CLIPBOARD:

URxvt.keysym.Control-Insert:    eval:selection_to_clipboard
URxvt.keysym.Shift-Insert:      eval:paste_clipboard

urxvt-selection-to-clipboard(1) can be used to synchronize CLIPBOARD with PRIMARY selection.

The urxvt-confirm-paste(1) extension displays a confirmation dialog when a paste containing control characters (like newlines) is detected. It is part of the default set and is loaded automatically, see urxvt(1) and #Disabling Perl extensions for more info.

Perl extensions

We can enable Perl extensions by including the following line:

URxvt.perl-ext-common: extension_name_1,extension_name_2,...

See also:

• urxvt(1) — the resource description

• urxvt-extensions(1) — list of available (prepackaged) extensions, do not confuse with default extension set

• $ man 1 urxvt-extension_name — manual pages for specific prepackaged extensions

• urxvtperl(3) — embedded Perl interpreter manual

Clickable URLs

You can make URLs in the terminal clickable using the matcher extension. For example, to open links in the default web browser with the left mouse button, add the following to .Xresources:

URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,matcher
URxvt.url-launcher: /usr/bin/xdg-open
URxvt.matcher.button: 1

Since rxvt-unicode 9.14, it is also possible to use matcher to open and list recent (currently limited to 10) URLs via keyboard:

URxvt.keysym.C-Delete: perl:matcher:last
URxvt.keysym.M-Delete: perl:matcher:list

Matching links can be colored with a chosen foreground or background color (see urxvt(1)), for example blue:

URxvt.matcher.rend.0: Uline Bold fg4

Alternatively, use colorUL for a #RRGGBB color. This will however color all underlined text, instead of only link matches:

URxvt.colorUL: #4682B4

Simple tabs

To add tabs to urxvt, add the following to your ~/.Xresources:

URxvt.perl-ext-common: ...,tabbed,...

To control tabs use:You can change the colors of tabs with the following:

URxvt.tabbed.tabbar-fg: 2
URxvt.tabbed.tabbar-bg: 0
URxvt.tabbed.tab-fg: 3
URxvt.tabbed.tab-bg: 0

In order to make the tabbar transparent set its value to -1

URxvt.tabbed.tabbar-bg: -1

If you need to rename the tab, you would probably want to install urxvt-tabbedex instead.

Fullscreen

You can install the AUR package urxvt-fullscreen, and then set a key binding to put urxvt fullscreen.

URxvt.perl-ext-common:  ...,fullscreen,...
URxvt.keysym.F11:       perl:fullscreen:switch

Disabling Perl extensions

If you do not use the Perl extension features, you can improve the security and speed by disabling Perl extensions completely:

URxvt.perl-ext-common:

To selectively disable an extension, you need to prepend a hyphen before the extension name:

Urxvt.perl-ext-common: default,-extension

Alternatively, you can explicitly list every extension you need, effectively disabling all others:

URxvt.perl-ext-common: eval,searchable-scrollback,resize-font

Troubleshooting

Wrong shell prompt placement after upgrading to 9.31

Some window managers may have the problem that your prompt appears somewhere in the middle of the window. It may happens on start and/or on window resize. The root cause is update in lines-rewrap algorithm.

To solve the problem you should apply lines-rewrap.patch.

You can also play with geometry, but result is environment– and workflow–dependent, there is no "one size fits all" solution:

• Set the real geometry: URxvt.geometry: 174x47.

• Set unrealistic geometry: URxvt.geometry: 400x400.

• Set rows to -1: URxvt.geometry: 80x-1.

  1. This may lead to inability to use some command line options, for example urxvt --borderColor black -e mc sometimes opens the terminal for a fraction of second with shell prompt placed in the middle of the first row instead of running Midnight Commander.

Ultimate solution is reverting changes in the source code:

• Comment out one line in screen.C (also see starttop.patch).

• Fully revert algorithm changes: 77062#comment216001.

Remote hosts

If you are logging into a remote host, you may encounter problems when running text-mode programs under rxvt-unicode. This can be fixed by installing rxvt-unicode-terminfo on the remote host or by copying /usr/share/terminfo/r/rxvt-unicode from your local machine to your host at ~/.terminfo/r/rxvt-unicode; same for rxvt-unicode-256color.

Some remote systems do not change title automatically unless you specify TERMxterm. To fix the issue add this line to .bashrc on the remote machine:

PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME}:${PWD}\007"'

Another fix you can try is to put following in your .Xresources:

URxvt.termName: rxvt

This is useful when connecting into remote hosts without admin privileges to install terminfo definition for rxvt-unicode.

Using rxvt-unicode as gmrun terminal

Unlike some other terminals, urxvt expects the arguments to -e to be given separately, rather than grouped together with quotes. This causes trouble with gmrun, which assumes the opposite behavior. This can be worked around by putting an eval in front of gmruns Terminal variable in .gmrunrc:

Terminal = eval urxvt
TermExec = ${Terminal} -e

gmrun uses /bin/sh to execute commands, so the eval is understood here. The eval has the side-effect of "breaking up" the argument to -e in the same way that $@ does in Bash, making the command intelligible to urxvt.

Key combinations do not work

See Get Alt key to work in terminal.

Very long lines cause slowdown

The matcher plugin may be the culprit here. It must match a regex against a line every time the line updates, and if you have a large saveLines value this can exacerbate the problem by allowing a very large maximum line length.

There are some simple workarounds:

• Reduce saveLines

• Disable the matcher plugin

If neither of those are palatable options, you can compromise by disabling URL matching past a certain cutoff point:

1. Copy /usr/lib/urxvt/perl/matcher to ~/.urxvt/ext/ (creating the directory if necessary)

2. Edit ~/.urxvt/ext/matcher, and find the my ($self, $row) = @_; line in the on_line_update sub. It should be line 270.

3. After that line, insert the line return () if $row < -100;. This disables URL matching on any line that starts more than 100 rows behind the top of the terminal.

No bold text in Midnight Commander

If started under rxvt-unicode with the default TERM setting, text that is usually bold in many other terminals will not appear so. The root of the issue is because xterm couples bright text color with the bold attribute—thus, bright colors will always appear as bold in xterm.

The solution is to configure Midnight Commander to explicitly use bold colors as desired, e.g. by editing the default skin as follows:

$ mkdir ~/.local/share/mc/skins
$ cp /usr/share/mc/skins/default.ini ~/.local/share/mc/skins/
$ sed -i -E 's/^(.* = (gray|brightred|brightgreen|yellow|brightblue|brightmagenta|brightcyan|white);.*)$/\0;bold/' ~/.local/share/mc/skins/default.ini

The above will create a copy of the default skin, but with all bright colors having an explicit bold attribute added.

See also

• Rxvt Unicode — video tutorial by Alex Booker

• Browsable CVS — the source code

• rxvt-unicode — enable-wide-glyphs.patch developer's dotfile