[Techtalk] rxvt - was: Re: End key no longer goes to EOL

[Akkana]

Almut Behrens writes:
> I was also quite pleased when I first came across rxvt -- and it's been
> my personal preference ever since. It's just so beautifully light-weight
> and sane (just uses about 300k mem, half of which are shared, compared

Me, too.  I'm a committed rxvt user.

The only thing I really dislike about rxvt, which is also true of most
of the other linux terminal emulators, is that (as distributed) page up
and page down don't.  You have to hold down the shift key to page up or
down.  Whose bright idea was that, and why does everybody copy it on
linux?  No other Unix has ever done that; no other linux app behaves
like that; I'm not aware of any app on any other platform that behaves
like that.  And it serves no purpose (arrow keys and ctrl-p/n work
fine for moving around in history without stealing the paging keys).

For rxvt it's a compile-time option, so I download the source and build
my own copy where page up/down work.  I'd like to put that on a pref or
resource and submit it, but last time I checked, the mail server for the
rxvt lists and web site was bouncing all mail. :-(

The other bug is that you can't select multiple screens at once (i.e.
if you select a whole page and keep dragging out of the window, most
apps will scroll for you so you can keep selecting, but rxvt won't).

Telsa Gwynne writes:
> Oh boy. A good half of gnome-terminal bugs at times seem to be
> "xterm does this neat thing. Why doesn't gnome-terminal?" I have
> discovered xterm does tons and tons of things now! (Someone kindly

It's true!  I tried to use konsole and gnome-terminal, but in both
cases there were just a few too many "neat things I'm used to from
xterm-derived programs" which I couldn't do in the new programs.
Rxvt was the best balance of old and new for my needs (I'd use xterm,
but the scrollbar is so ugly I find it depressing to look at).

> I believe there is long historical background to the backspace/delete 
> key thing and what each one does or should do; but the reason I never
> really got going with rxvt was that in the FAQ for it, it's plain that 
> rxvt does it one way, and that I was used to it the other way. Purely 

I wish someone would write a FAQ about backspace/delete on linux.
I have "stty erase ^H" in my .login because I've always needed it
on all Unices, but linux does additional things and somehow I always
end up with apps that will take only Backspace, or only Delete -- I
use ^H or backspace interchangeably, which works in other unices and
in most but not all Linux apps.

> I went back to gnome-terminal purely because I was used to it,
> and I love dingus-clicking. I believe KDE's terminal emulator
> (kterm, not to be confused with kterm the kanji one?) also
> does this now: when the mouse moves over a URL, the URL becomes
> underlined. By control-key-left-clicking, you can open your
> preferred browser on that URL. Anything from ftp to http to 
> https. It sounds complete fluff and bloat, but I would hate
> not to have that now.

One of the "neat features that xterm-derived programs have" is that
you can change the word boundary definitions so that double-clicking
will (usually) select a whole url, which you can then middlemouse-paste
into your browser window.  Since I switch between several different
browsers (galeon, mozilla, NS6.x, NS4, and occasionally others)
it's too likely at any given time that "my browser of choice" isn't
the one I actually have running right then.

Val Henson writes:
> I switched to Eterm as part of my migration to Enlightenment and Gnome

Eterm's backgrounds are very cool.  Not just the fact that you can use a
background, but the ones they ship with it.  My husband used Eterm for
quite a while, and I envied him the backgrounds (but my eyes don't deal
well with text against a varied background).  Now he's switched over
to rxvt in transparency mode (where his X background is a picture of
me on our honeymoon -- isn't that just sickeningly sweet? :-)

> in an office (now I telecommute from home), I felt that it was my duty
> to have an extremely pretty tricked-out desktop in order to show my
> co-workers how wimpy Windows NT was. :) I had a beautiful metallic

That is a very good idea.  I may need to reconfigure my laptop with
that in mind.

Jenn Vesperman writes:
> Me, I'm black-on-white. Strictly black-on-white. Blue on white is

White backgrounds make my eyes hurt almost immediately.  I use black
on light grey, which for some reason is much easier on my eyes than
white.

The funny thing is, until about a year ago I religiously used green on
black or white on black, and dark-on-light hurt my eyes.  But my sight
is getting worse as I get older, and I've had to do a lot of playing
with Xdefaults to keep up.

	...Akkana