Wisdom is the prime thing

I’ve been a happy Eterm user for quite a while now. But, recently, I decided that there is no good reason for opening Firefox or OpenOffice just to compose emails and text in Russian. I need a terminal emulator that is fast, customizable, and supports Unicode, ie. UTF-8.

After doing a lot of searching, I found rxvt-unicode, or urxvt. It meets all my requirements, and so far I am very pleased with it. In the past I have noticed in screenshots around the web that urxvt is the terminal of choice for many people in the Linux world. After doing some investigation, I can see why.

It is fast. Here are typical results from time cat /usr/share/dict/words on the three terminals I tested on my computer:

Eterm:  2.382s
uxterm: 2.051s
urxvt:  1.559s

One concern I had was getting fonts set up. Urxvt supports XFT fonts, which means you can use Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, Terminus, or any other UTF-8 friendly font you like. I tried Terminus and, while it is a beautiful font, the smallest readable point size was 10 which made my term windows far too big. I went back to the smoothansi font from the artwiz font pack. Bold fonts didn’t look right, though, so I had to set the bold font to be the same as the normal font in my .Xdefaults, and everything was great. My .Xdefaults file is shown below.

Another issue was getting Russian text to show up. The major thing I had to do was make sure the correct UTF-8 locale was generated on my computer. To do that on ArchLinux, I had to edit the /etc/locale.gen file and uncomment the en_US.UTF-8 line. Then I ran locale-gen and, voila!, working UTF-8 text in my terminal.

Here is my .Xdefaults file. I include my previous color settings from Eterm.

URxvt*termName:                 rxvt
#URxvt*font:                        xft:Terminus-10
URxvt*font:                     -*-smoothansi-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-*
URxvt*boldFont:                     -*-smoothansi-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-*

#URxvt*inheritPixmap:           True
URxvt*jumpScroll:               True
URxvt*visualBell:               False
URxvt*scrollBar:                False
URxvt*scrollStyle:              xterm
URxvt*scrollWithBuffer:         False
URxvt*scrollTtyOutput:          False
URxvt*scrollTtyKeypress:        True
URxvt*internalBorder:           5
URxvt*externalBorder:           0
URxvt*mouseWheelScrollPage:     False
URxvt*foreground:               #b9b9b9
URxvt*background:               Black
#URxvt*tintColor:               #333333
URxvt*tintColor:                Black
URxvt*shading:                  80
URxvt*cursorColor:              #bbbbbb
URxvt*reverseVideo:             False
URxvt*saveLines:                65535

# rxvt colors
URxvt*colorBD:                  #eeeeee
URxvt*color0:                   #000000
URxvt*color1:                   #cc7a7a
URxvt*color2:                   #689cad
URxvt*color3:                   #cc7a7a
URxvt*color4:                   #d1eeee
URxvt*color5:                   #eed8ae
URxvt*color6:                   #bfac73
URxvt*color7:                   gray
URxvt*color8:                   gray40
URxvt*color9:                   #b36b6b
URxvt*color10:                  #72ad68
URxvt*color11:                  #5d9c7c
URxvt*color12:                  #689cad
URxvt*color13:                  #a98fbf
URxvt*color14:                  #a9be71
URxvt*color15:                  #333333

# My old Eterm colors
#URxvt*color0: #000000
#URxvt*color1: #b80000
#URxvt*color2: #00b800
#URxvt*color3: #b8b800
#URxvt*color4: #0000b8
#URxvt*color5: #b800b8
#URxvt*color6: #00b8b8
#URxvt*color7: #b8b8b8
#URxvt*color8: #686868
#URxvt*color9: #ff6868
#URxvt*color10: #68ff68
#URxvt*color11: #ffff68
#URxvt*color12: #6868ff
#URxvt*color13: #ff68ff
#URxvt*color14: #68ffff
#URxvt*color15: #ffffff
#URxvt*colorbd: #ffffff
#URxvt*colorul: #ffffff

And, finally, for an obligatory screenshot: