Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

dannytatom · 2009-02-17 18:29:42

I notice a lot of people using urxvt in the screenshots thread (esp with tiling WMs) and am wondering why. I've always used Terminator because of it's abiliity to split into multiple terminals, which makes using awesome even easier. I'm just wondering if there's something about urxvt that I'm missing.

brisbin33 · 2009-02-17 18:34:31

i use it for transparency in openbox via xcompmgr. can't speak for anyone else though.

na12 · 2009-02-17 18:38:38

copy/paste doesn't works with urxvt,tilda has transparency too

brisbin33 · 2009-02-17 18:42:07

na12 wrote:

copy/paste doesn't works with urxvt,tilda has transparency too

copy paste works fine for me, just have to know the buttons

edit: typos

Last edited by brisbin33 (2009-02-17 18:42:21)

Ashren · 2009-02-17 18:42:19

urxvt is nice because it:

1. Is very customizable through .Xdefaults.
2. Is very fast - especially with urxvtc.
3. makes you look cool in screenshot threads.

dannytatom · 2009-02-17 18:44:21

Ashren wrote:

urxvt is nice because it:
3. makes you look cool in screenshot threads.

hah, that it does. terminator also has transparency brisbin33. as far as customizing it, it's not as global as customizing Xdefaults, but it's own config file is easy to use.

WhiteMagic · 2009-02-17 18:51:20

I mostly stick with it because of:
1. opening urls on a click in the browser
2. urxvtc / urxvtd

I don't use the transparency features and for multiple terminals in a single window I use screen.

anrxc · 2009-02-17 19:00:00

Ashren wrote:

urxvt is nice because it:
...
3. makes you look cool in screenshot threads.

Well, not really, especially with a transparent terminal,
let's blur or obfuscate (colorful WP's) our working space (and while we are at it let's throw some TTF fonts with AA in there too!!). So UNCOOL

4. dannytatom when you look at it from historical standpoint all these Kuake-Terminators did not exist some years back, and among popular terminal emulators urxvt was fast, feature rich but also extensible, it had true-type support ...list goes on... and ofcourse it supported unicode (hence the name) where alternatives like aterm failed. But as you see even by standards today it's a good terminal so it keeps gaining new users.

test1000 · 2009-02-17 19:00:40

konsole! ... konsole! I use konsole!

Last edited by test1000 (2009-02-17 19:00:54)

Ashren · 2009-02-17 19:20:42

anrxc wrote:

Ashren wrote:
urxvt is nice because it:
...
3. makes you look cool in screenshot threads.
Well, not really, especially with a transparent terminal,
let's blur or obfuscate (colorful WP's) our working space (and while we are at it let's throw some TTF fonts with AA in there too!!). So UNCOOL

Transparency rules!!

I'm using urxvtc because it makes me feel that I belong to the group of elite linux users. Especially I do my best to tile my terminals in an elite way when taking screenshots and I make sure they contain lots of Vim's and other important coding stuff. Sometimes I even throw in a mpc or moc to show off my music taste in a cool way.

Who needs TTF in terminals when you've got Dina?*

*This last comment is actually serious.

Last edited by Ashren (2009-02-17 19:21:34)

anrxc · 2009-02-17 19:41:04

Ashren wrote:

...I belong to the group of elite linux users.

You forgot the first rule, never speak of the Lineage in public, you could be excommunicated

Ashren wrote:

Who needs TTF in terminals when you've got Dina?*

I know tuomov is not very popular in this community but he has some good writings on linux font state. It's not so much off-topic as it could help anyone who reads it to find a good set of fonts for their urxvt/terminal emulator.

Dieter@be · 2009-02-17 19:46:06

other then that it only supports the primary x selection and not the other one (or the other way around, whatever) it's the best.
it's light, it's fast, it does everything i need, and more. it does not come with gtk/gconf/qt/... deps

Borosai · 2009-02-17 19:48:58

I'm not 100% sure why I started using rxvt-unicode years ago, but it probably had more to do with not using the "regular" term (in this case, xterm). I think I compared all the alternatives back then, settled on urxvt, and have used it the most ever since. But I'm not very attached to it: if I'm using a WM like Openbox, I'll go with urxvt because I've already gone through the trouble of configuring it. If I'm using KDE or XFCE, I'll probably use Konsole or Terminal (or urxvt if I run into any issues).

I suppose, after configuring it, it just feels right and works as expected.

moljac024 · 2009-02-17 19:56:55

I just use xterm now...

dolby · 2009-02-17 20:00:34

dannytatom wrote:

I notice a lot of people using urxvt in the screenshots thread (esp with tiling WMs) and am wondering why. I've always used Terminator because of it's abiliity to split into multiple terminals, which makes using awesome even easier. I'm just wondering if there's something about urxvt that I'm missing.

You are missing using a decent terminal. Use screen instead if you want splitting. In most, if not all cases the Unix principle of "do one thing and do it right" prevails.

Last edited by dolby (2009-02-17 21:41:09)

dannytatom · 2009-02-17 20:09:32

I've used it before and to me it seems using urxvt and screen together is less "do one thing and do it right" than using a terminal that does it for you. Granted, I've never used screen, so I can't say much on it. Also, terminator is pretty small and doesn't have dependencies. I'm not saying everyone should use it, just pointing it out.

Targets (1): terminator-0.12-1  

Total Download Size:    0.16 MB
Total Installed Size:   1.17 MB

dolby · 2009-02-17 20:13:24

Correction: you *think* it doesnt have dependencies. See this patch http://repos.archlinux.org/viewvc.cgi/c … =community
If Allan hadnt graciously granted you with it , terminator would have a buchload of dependencies, which translates to half of GNOME.

Just for the record, and because i know you also use Crunchbang, or you did anyway, Ubuntu doesnt have that patch AFAIK (might be wrong)

PS1. Allan, that is not very vanilla of you

Last edited by dolby (2009-02-17 20:18:00)

dannytatom · 2009-02-17 20:22:38

Ah, well much thanks to Allan. And yeah, I wouldn't have noticed the deps in #! as its got a lot of the deps already.

chimeric · 2009-02-17 20:52:49

I started using urxvt-unicode some years ago when I switched to a UTF8 locale - and well I haven't looked for an alternative since .

Last edited by chimeric (2009-02-17 20:53:01)

jordi · 2009-02-17 20:55:02

No idea why I started using urxvt, probably because I wasn't satisfied with xterm and urxvt was the "other" terminal I knew.

Since then I never had a reason to look for something else.

buttons · 2009-02-17 21:25:24

dannytatom wrote:

Granted, I've never used screen, so I can't say much on it.

GET OUT

I kid. I kid.

Screen isn't just for multi-terminals with customisable key bindings. It also makes ssh amazing.

Ponder this:

Oh hey, I'm away, but I wanted to download this thing. I'll just ssh in, and set it to download at home.
Hmm. If I turn off my laptop, it'll stop downloading. This sure is taking a while.
Crap! I lost the connection/my computer crashed/oops I closed it. I'll have to start again!

Whereas screen you detach and it's always there.

It's especially relevant for me because I have large computationally-intensive projects for my phd research. If I need to start something, and I'm not in front of my computer, I just ssh in, screen, start it, detach it, feel like I'm being productive while I go read forums or worse, go to class.

Square · 2009-02-17 21:38:23

My favorite terminal was always xterm, but I found it to be lacking. I looked through terminal after terminal... only to find myself landing on urxvt. Now, I wouldn't use anything else. It's fast, customizable, can be run as a daemon/client, and etc...

All of that with tmux (screen users, check out tmux!) and I'm highly satisfied!

Last edited by Square (2009-02-17 21:40:21)

phrakture · 2009-02-17 22:46:28

I use urxvt for two reasons: TTF support and the plugin/extension mechanism (matching URLs is the particularly interesting bit here)

Lexion · 2009-02-18 01:28:51

ashren: I just tried urxvt(d/c). It's awesome. Thanks.

I use urxvtc because it's configurable by .Xdefaults and it has transparency. If you want something faster, there is always rxvt
(fastest terminal, but no transparency).

I used screen for a bit, but now I just use multiple windows. And I won't use tmux (it's BSD-Licenced).

keenerd · 2009-02-18 01:51:05

I don't get why urxvt is so popular. I used it exclusively a few years ago in WMII. I stopped using it because resizing transparent terminals would freeze WMII. Spawn a new terminal, wait three seconds while everyone sorts out their backgrounds.

The VTE series of terminals is better in every way. Faster, more stable, matches it for features. I really like the URL support. Urxvt will hyperlink the URL, but VTE will hyperlink each part of the URL. So http://example.com/subdir/page.html will create three different links, one for each nested level. It also supports both clipboards. I don't care for tabbed terminals or menu bars (I disable both), but you get those for free, too.

There are many UI wrappers built on top of VTE. My favorite is roxterm.

The final reason I don't even have urxvt installed on any of my computers is because of its needless bloat. I kid you not. Urxvt installs at 5.1Mb. Roxterm+VTE is only 3.5 Mb.

Give roxterm a try, it is hard to find fault with it.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-02-17 18:29:42

Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#2 2009-02-17 18:34:31

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#3 2009-02-17 18:38:38

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#4 2009-02-17 18:42:07

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#5 2009-02-17 18:42:19

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#6 2009-02-17 18:44:21

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#7 2009-02-17 18:51:20

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#8 2009-02-17 19:00:00

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#9 2009-02-17 19:00:40

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#10 2009-02-17 19:20:42

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#11 2009-02-17 19:41:04

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#12 2009-02-17 19:46:06

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#13 2009-02-17 19:48:58

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#14 2009-02-17 19:56:55

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#15 2009-02-17 20:00:34

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#17 2009-02-17 20:13:24

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#18 2009-02-17 20:22:38

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#19 2009-02-17 20:52:49

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#20 2009-02-17 20:55:02

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#21 2009-02-17 21:25:24

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#22 2009-02-17 21:38:23

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#23 2009-02-17 22:46:28

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#24 2009-02-18 01:28:51

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#25 2009-02-18 01:51:05

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

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