Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

SamC · 2009-02-18 02:06:18

Keenerd: Don't forget all of GTK, glade, dbus, and the hicolor icon theme!

Edit: Not to be pedantic or anything, but it only hyperlinks the domain and then the rest of the url. Plus, urxvt, doing nothing, takes up about 6mb of reserved memory. Roxterm takes about twice as much.

Last edited by SamC (2009-02-18 02:22:37)

keenerd · 2009-02-18 02:59:14

Don't forget all of GTK, glade, dbus, and the hicolor icon theme!

I run a pretty barebone system, but...

pacman -Rsc gtk2               102 packages, 635.90 Mb
pacman -Rsc libsm              183 packages, 763.39 Mb
pacman -Rsc libglade            35 packages, 203.80 Mb
pacman -Rsc dbus-glib           75 packages, 309.24 Mb
pacman -Rsc hicolor-icon-theme  14 packages,  44.89 Mb

Chances are most people already have these deps installed :-) Similarly, for urxvt you'd have to include gcc-libs, libxft, libxpm, and gtk-perl.

Though now I am curious. Why are some of those deps in there? Gtk2 makes sense, glade too I guess. Rendering tabs and menus comes at an expense. But the icons should be optional, and dbus shouldn't be needed at all. Must investigate this. I still stand by my claim that roxterm is faster, for no other reason than extensively trying every terminal on a slow P2.

You are technically correct about the hyperlink behavior, my bad.

Ram usage, I've never really cared about (Opera is currently using 400Mb on 92 tabs). I normally run small-ish SSDs with as much ram as I can pack into the machine, no swap. Space on disk is my primary concern. But if I'm going to argue for saving 1.6 megs of drive, it is perfectly fair to counter with 6 megs of ram.

sabooky · 2009-02-18 03:01:23

When I was using compiz/gnome I used gnome-terminal and didn't really care for urxvt. When I made the move to awesome (cool sentence so far) window manager, urxvt seemed like a much better fit.
Since those are the two terminals I've used recently I'll compare them.

gnome-terminal
pro:
Easy to read/use tabs (I never liked urxvt's tabs)
can copy to xclipboard easily
lots of menus and options
change profiles on the fly (turn off transparency because something is hard to read, etc..)

con:
slow
once I accidentally detach a tab, never figured out how to reattach it
with tabs and all, lots of clutter

urxvt
pro:
minimalistic
urxvtd/c makes spawning clients almost instantaneous (never had the daemon crash on me, though I've accidentally killed it a couple of times )
great screen real estate
tons of options
can be extended with perl
much faster than gnome-terminal
does block selects (I've never.. ever used them, but it looked like a cool feature)

con:
can be a PITA to configure
requires a lot of tinkering to first get it set up
no xclipboard support by default (I ended up writing a perl extension for it)
can't change options while running very easily (admittedly, I haven't really researched this.. but the fact that I have to research it is enough)
had some glitches when I used real transparency with xcompmgr (might of been xcompmgrs fault)

Really the only feature I miss is being able to toggle transparency on the fly. Tiling window manager makes me not really care so much for tabs..

SamC · 2009-02-18 03:05:42

Of course, if you're going for small size, you'd just switch over to a console for whenever you needed to use the shell. However, there are smaller terms that you might want to try out, such as xterm or st (by the people who made DWM). Also, gtk-perl is not required, which eliminates the need for GTK completely.

Dieter@be · 2009-02-18 12:06:49

keenerd wrote:

Similarly, for urxvt you'd have to include gcc-libs, libxft, libxpm, and gtk-perl.

optdeps don't count! urxvt works just fine without gtk-perl. (maybe the others too, didn't check)

sen · 2009-02-18 23:23:41

sabooky wrote:

can't change options while running very easily (admittedly, I haven't really researched this.. but the fact that I have to research it is enough)

xrdb -load ~/.Xdefaults

@topic
Hmm, I used mrxvt (with tabs) for a long time and switched to urxvt when I began using screen 2 years ago.
Now I can't live without screen anymore (ssh...) and just need a terminal that works well with screen, offers some eye candy(real transparency, xft(+utf8)) and is fast. I don't need anything else and urxvt is just the best terminal that I could find at that time and I'm still very happy with it. If there is a better one I would switch and I think it's the same for many people that use urxvt... why use something else when it does everything what you need.

andre.ramaciotti · 2009-02-19 13:51:22

I like urxvt because it's really fast. My computer is rather old and output high amounts of text in a terminal with a TTF font is slow.

Also, I like urxvtd/urxvtc.

skwo · 2009-02-19 15:08:31

I liked xterm, but I couldn't customize it as I wanted, and I didn't want to stick to kde/gnome/xfce terminals, so I tried urxvt and liked it

benob · 2009-02-19 16:09:08

Something makes me totally mad with XFCE's Terminal: middle click on a tab closes it. Try pasting something while not looking at the mouse... Chances are that you just killed your session.

I Will give urxvt a try.

skottish · 2009-02-19 18:28:04

For me: URL launcher, extensible, fast, and fonts look great. Although, xterm is good and I'd be happy using it if urxvt wasn't around. All VTE based terminals are dreadfully slow, so I don't use them.

dolby · 2009-02-19 21:29:19

The only reason i dont use xterm today is that i couldnt find a way for it to fit the whole screen real estate like urxvt does. Other than that i dont think you can compare xterm to any terminal.
xterm can match urls too, but not launch em automagically.

phisphere · 2009-02-19 22:02:19

i use urxvt for the following two reasons:
1. tabs make sense under urxvt (shift + left/right for switching and shift+ down for opening new tab)
2. easy to configure with .Xdefault

(3. i'm used to it)

onearm · 2009-02-20 09:48:57

Urxvt since years because:

- urxvtd/urxvtc, I like the concept and reducing memory usage is always a good idea. Plus, it never crashed, not even once.
- all the customization goes in Xdefaults, no yet another configuration file to clutter my home
- works very well with screen (I don't use tabs even if I like that they are available)
- transparency support (fake and real)
- it can be very minimal, I have all my terminals without borders/menu/whatever, just the plain terminal window. I'm aware that urxvt is not the only one to be able to be so minimal though.

test1000 · 2009-02-20 12:28:15

i used to use urxvt but now i use konsole because(in no particular order):

there's a bunch of different commands and notify options you can run when:
* it is silence on the terminal.(cool for compile jobs) and when it is activity on the terminal
* it have bookmarks(yeah i know this can be easily implemented in the shell aswell)
* you can search in the console output
* it has "open filemanager here"
* tabs
* fullscreen
* correct transparency with kwin or any other app that supports that.
* save all console output
* quick to open(this might be because of qt 4.5 i don't know)

also some other stuff like "shared view" in which you can get two/three/four... terminals in one(the same view though, it's not terminator/screen) ++

It also has instant configuration of every thinkable & unthinkable configuration there is with profile support which i guess some people need aswell. I'm using konsole in kde 4.2 though, i can't remember how the old one worked.

Last edited by test1000 (2009-02-20 12:30:16)

chilebiker · 2009-02-22 01:01:57

I never understood the hype aobut urxvt, for me sakura does the job!

celettu · 2009-02-23 18:49:35

chilebiker wrote:

I never understood the hype aobut urxvt, for me sakura does the job!

+1
Can't be bothered with .Xdefaults. pacman -S sakura and I'm ready to go

ravn · 2009-02-23 21:11:10

xterm + screen = true
I use .Xdefaults for font, color and geometry; all the customisation I need...

moljac024 · 2009-02-23 21:30:58

I'm back to gnome-terminal right now....xterm was kinda slow

Procyon · 2009-02-23 21:32:33

I need urxvt's advanced font features, like codeset specific fonts and setting fonts for missing glyphs.

scooterpd · 2009-02-25 08:40:48

no one cares for mrxvt? all this praise for urxvt makes me want to try it, but i dont think i can get away from a terminal with tabs and profiles.

fflarex · 2009-02-25 13:52:48

urxvt has both tabs (-pe tabbed) and profiles (use the -name option).

PJ · 2009-02-25 14:57:05

I could probably change terminal right now but my original reasons for selecting urxvt over any other was that it could use TTF and it had unicode support. This was at least 3 years ago so it have probably change since then but I am still happy with urxvt so I don't really see any real reason to change terminal.

Last edited by PJ (2009-02-25 14:58:02)

adamlau · 2009-02-27 10:10:05

urxvtc uses much less memory than the VTE-based lxterminal and terminal (Xfce) and is noticeably faster. With options such as jumpscroll, tasks do not have to allocate resources to redraws.

will1911a1 · 2009-02-27 13:35:14

I only used it for the transparency.

joephantom · 2009-02-27 21:37:22

sabooky wrote:

no xclipboard support by default (I ended up writing a perl extension for it)

Could you share it? I would love to have urxvt with xclipboard support.

Arch Linux

#26 2009-02-18 02:06:18

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#27 2009-02-18 02:59:14

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#28 2009-02-18 03:01:23

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#29 2009-02-18 03:05:42

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#30 2009-02-18 12:06:49

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#31 2009-02-18 23:23:41

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#32 2009-02-19 13:51:22

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#33 2009-02-19 15:08:31

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#34 2009-02-19 16:09:08

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#35 2009-02-19 18:28:04

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#36 2009-02-19 21:29:19

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#37 2009-02-19 22:02:19

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#38 2009-02-20 09:48:57

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#39 2009-02-20 12:28:15

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#40 2009-02-22 01:01:57

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#41 2009-02-23 18:49:35

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#42 2009-02-23 21:11:10

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#43 2009-02-23 21:30:58

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#44 2009-02-23 21:32:33

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#45 2009-02-25 08:40:48

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#46 2009-02-25 13:52:48

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#47 2009-02-25 14:57:05

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#48 2009-02-27 10:10:05

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#49 2009-02-27 13:35:14

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

#50 2009-02-27 21:37:22

Re: Why do people use urxvt over everything else?

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