Urxvt, here I come

Since some time, I moved away from the “traditional” linux desktop environments such as Gnome, Kde or Xfce. Not that those usual desktop environments are bad, or hard to use (far from that), just that at some point they just have to much for me. To much of functionality I do not use.

To accommodate my way of working, I ended up using tiling window managers such as i3 to finally Xmonad (associated with taffybar). Those tools are just perfect. Minimalistic and awesome (I mean the adjective, but this appends to also name another tiling window manager). The only problem I still had was: what terminal emulator should I use? I have been using interchangeably xfce4-terminal, konsole and gnome-terminal. However, they tend to bring with them the entire set of libraries designed to support entire desktop environments. I do not really need those just to run vim within my terminal emulator…

After some time, I finally gave a shot to rxvt-unicode (also known as urxvt). Unlike the previous terminal emulators I mentioned, the default look and feel is kind of “wurch”, and there is no menu to configure it. Like the “good old days”, a regular configuration file does the trick, here I present to you ~/.Xresources. It is a general configuration for X related application look and feel. It controls fonts, colors, shapes of graphical elements… A presentation.

Here is my configuration to get a solarized presentation (borrowed from here):

!-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
! Xft settings
!-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Xft.dpi: 96
Xft.antialias: true
Xft.rgba: rgb
Xft.hinting: true
Xft.hintstyle: hintslight
!-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
! URxvt settings
! Colours lifted from Solarized (http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized)
! More info at:
! http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/rxvt-unicode/doc/rxvt.1.pod
!-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
URxvt.depth: 32
URxvt.transparent: false
URxvt.fading: 0
URxvt.urgentOnBell: true
URxvt.visualBell: true
URxvt.loginShell: true
URxvt.font: xft:Liberation Mono for Powerline:size=9
! URxvt*boldFont: xft:Monospace:pixelsize=14
! Fix font space
! URxvt*letterSpace: -1
! Scrollbar
URxvt.scrollStyle: rxvt
URxvt.scrollBar: false
! Perl extensions
URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,matcher
URxvt.matcher.button: 1
URxvt.urlLauncher: firefox
! Cursor
URxvt.cursorBlink: true
URxvt.cursorColor: #657b83
URxvt.cursorUnderline: false
! Pointer
URxvt.pointerBlank: true

#define S_base03        #002b36
#define S_base02        #073642
#define S_base01        #586e75
#define S_base00        #657b83
#define S_base0         #839496
#define S_base1         #93a1a1
#define S_base2         #eee8d5
#define S_base3         #fdf6e3

*background:            S_base3
*foreground:            S_base00
*fadeColor:             S_base3
*cursorColor:           S_base01
*pointerColorBackground:S_base1
*pointerColorForeground:S_base01

#define S_yellow        #b58900
#define S_orange        #cb4b16
#define S_red           #dc322f
#define S_magenta       #d33682
#define S_violet        #6c71c4
#define S_blue          #268bd2
#define S_cyan          #2aa198
#define S_green         #859900

!! black dark/light
*color0:                S_base02
*color8:                S_base03

!! red dark/light
*color1:                S_red
*color9:                S_orange

!! green dark/light
*color2:                S_green
*color10:               S_base01

!! yellow dark/light
*color3:                S_yellow
*color11:               S_base00

!! blue dark/light
*color4:                S_blue
*color12:               S_base0

!! magenta dark/light
*color5:                S_magenta
*color13:               S_violet

!! cyan dark/light
*color6:                S_cyan
*color14:               S_base1

!! white dark/light
*color7:                S_base2
*color15:               S_base3

As you can see, I also use fonts tailored for powerline. They can be found here, then just follow installation instructions. Last interesting point of urxvt, it us a full 256 colors terminal emulator! Welcome in 2015, but the fact is that the other terminal emulators I mentioned earlier only do 16, and get a pretty limited output when using powerline.

One annoying thing about thing with this “old-style” terminal emulator is that it is not well supported by remote servers when connecting through ssh. Additional terminfo descriptions might have to be installed (copy the files rxvt-unicode and rxvt-unicode-256color in /usr/share/terminfo/r/ or ~/.terminfo/r/).

More usefull information can be found at ArchLinux wiki, they got detailed explanations.

Here it is for tonight, this was my bookmark post!