Re: [tlug] Moving on from xterm

[Chris Salzberg <chris@example.com>]

Hi Curt,

Saw this email and since I happen to be fiddling with terminal 
configuration at this very moment, felt I had to respond.

I used xfce4-terminal for a long time and recently switched to 
rxvt-unicode (urxvt), after seeing it referenced all over the place.

One thing that I wanted to be able to do was, when opening a new 
terminal in i3, to jump to the same directory as the last terminal. This 
happens to be really really useful for my workflow (since you use screen 
I guess less relevant for you). I couldn't find a way to do this with 
xfce4-terminal but there's a tool for it that works with urxvt (and some 
other terminals too): https://github.com/schischi/xcwd

I also wanted to be able to resize font in a terminal on the fly. Call 
me weird but it's just something that I often do (eyes tired, doing a 
presentation, etc.) and there seemed to be no easy way to do that in 
xfce4-terminal or many other terminals. In urxvt there's a perl 
extension for it (resize-font).

Aside from that, I've found that while on the surface a lot is similar 
between these two, urxvt had a lot more going for it when you dig down.  
The way you can add functionality through perl extensions is neat, for 
example (although some super security conscious may want to disable it)

However there are some downsides:

- Inability to render fonts that are not *strictly* monospace. If you 
 like getting emoji and stuff like that to render correctly you might 
 have some issues (this is a longstanding issue, the urxvt maintainer 
 refused to budge on this and he has his reasons). I saw the unchi in 
 the recent email thread as a box.
- I use fcitx as my input method, and with xfce4-terminal I can get the 
 preedit (kanji) to show directly under the cursor, whereas in urxvt I 
 can only get it on the bottom of the terminal ("OnTheSpot")
- Currently, for some reason and only on one of two computers I have, 
 rendering has gotten slow with xft fonts. This may be something 
 specific about my configuration.

As to your requirements:

>    * Use [FreeType](https://www.freetype.org/), because that's the
>    standard these days, right?

Yes

>    * Use standard modern input methods so I can type Japanese.

Yes (use fcitx)

>    * Avoid decoration: I don't use tabbed terminals and I should be
>    able to turn off menu and tool bars and things like that.

Yep

>    * No need for special features like iTerm2's ability to display
>    images inline and whatnot.

Doesn't have those

>    * That said, I use Gnu screen a lot, so if there's any special
>    integration there that would be helpful for me, that might be a
>    bonus.

Don't use screen, can't say

>    * Not dragging in a huge pile of desktop environment (Gnome, KDE,
>    whatever) is a definite bonus.

Yep

>    * Configuration should use some reasonable text-based format in a
>    file in the homedir somewhere so I can use my usual systems to
>    maintain it in Git.

Configuration is via .Xresources, very standard. And this is actually a 
big plus over xfce4-terminal, which I tried to track with a symlink to a 
git repository file not very successfully, because xfce4-terminal kept 
overwriting it...

Chris

> I'm playing with xfce4-terminal right now, mainly because it happens
> to be here. It seems to be ok. I'm about to have a look at
> rxvt-unicode (the 256-color multi-langauge version) which at first
> glance sounds as if it would be the sort of thing I'm looking for, but
> I don't know anything about it as of yet.
>
> Anybody have any other suggestions?
>
> cjs
> --
> Curt Sampson         <cjs@example.com>         +81 90 7737 2974
>
> To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
>    - L Peter Deutsch
>
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