This is a clone of rxvt, containing unicode support. As of it's rich features, it's my preferred choice when it comes to having a unicode-aware X terminal.

Configuration can be done both via commandline parameters and X resources. As the former is trivial, this section describes the latter only.

This is a sample $HOME/.Xresources:

URxvt.background: black
URxvt.foreground: grey
URxvt.inheritPixmap: true
URxvt.fading: 35
! URxvt.fadeColor: grey
URxvt.font: 6x10
URxvt.boldFont: 6x10bold
URxvt.tintColor: grey
URxvt.shading: 20

Comments start with an exclamation mark. Resources of the class URxvt are being shared between urxvt instances, resources of the class Rxvt are being shared between both instances of urxvt and rxvt. All possible long options are allowed to be specified as X resource.

Many window managers read $HOME/.Xresources upon startup, but some don't. Also it's generally possible to specify display and screen local resources, which is not covered by any window manager as far as I know.

To interpret defined X resources, use xrdb:

xrdb -all $HOME/.Xresources

this applies the user defined resources to the global (screen-independent) resource property as well as the screen-dependent resource property.

To use special settings for a given screen, use the '-display' option together with '-screen':

xrdb -display :0.1 -screen $HOME/.Xresources.screen1

in this example the resources of the first display's second screen are being altered. Note that this is being invalidated by the first call to xrdb shown here (using the -all option).

There are two ways of getting a transparent background.

Using the inheritPixmap option should work for everyone:

URxvt.inheritPixmap: true
URxvt.tintColor: grey
URxvt.shading: 20

it enables the use of the desktop background as terminal background. To darken/lighten it, use shading with positive/negative values (in percent). tintColor enables tinting of the background with the specified color.

No documentation available yet.

Yet another killer feature: rxvt supports fading out it's content when the window is unfocused (never ever again typing something accidentially into the wrong window).

To enable fading, simply specify the option fading with a value in percent:

URxvt.fading: 35
URxvt.fadeColor: grey

fadeColor seems to default to grey, so it can be omitted. Beware of fading too much, you should at least be able to read the contents of unfocused windows!

Somehow the mouse pointer regularly gets into one's way when typing. As there is generally no need for a visible mouse pointer when working with the keyboard, it can simply be made invisible:

URxvt.pointerBlank: true
URxvt.pointerBlankDelay: 2

pointerBlankDelay specifies the number of seconds of inactivity needed before blanking occurs. As 2 seconds is default, this can be omitted.

rxvt-unicode sets the TERM variable to it's name. But as this is unknown to many systems/applications, it will sooner or later lead to trouble (at least screen didn't work for me out of the box). To get around setting the TERM variable in any shell startscript (which is definitely the worst way of doing this), the value for the TERM variable to be set can be configured:

URxvt.termName: rxvt

as rxvt is a lot more common to many applications, it should be a good start. Alternatively this could be set to xterm to allow full compatibility (but maybe breaking some rxvt features).

Ever been using ControlSockets for Master/Slave operation of ssh? Then you know…

The daemon has to be running all the time, so starting is done at .xsession/.xinitrc state:

urxvtd -q -o -f

The options are:

Especially -o is very needful, so one doesn't need to care about multiple instances of urxvtd when restarting the X server.

Then each time when urxvt would be called, just call urxvtc. Actually this doesn't generate a new process, but connects to the daemon to do everything internally. This saves some startup time, and a lot of memory.

Beware: if for some reasons urxvt/urxvtd is instable on your system, better don't use client/server mode. If the daemon crashes, all client instances are gone.