Oh my terminal!

Which to use?

My requirements for a terminal are not all too fancy. All I want is a simple application that just works and doesn't get in the way. I tried out several of the available terminal emulators including rxvt, urxvt, the ubiquitous xterm and others before I ended up using terminator for the last couple of years. The other alternatives I discarded because most are lacking multiple of the following treats in their default configuration:

• good looks
• 256 colors
• mouse support
• scrolling with mouse wheel seems to be an issue, in particular when done with pagers (less, man, git help)
• UTF-8 support
• hidden menu bar and scroll bar
• working Ctrl-/Shift + Arrow/F1-F12 key combinations in VIM

However, I now decided to give rxvt-unicode (also called urxvt) another go and at the same time improve my xterm configuration as well for a couple of reasons:

First, I hardly need nor use any of terminator's impressive list of features. I don't need split terminal windows when I have a tiling window manager that can do basically the same thing in a more universal fashion. I was always slightly unhappy with the feature-fuss and wanted to use a simpler terminal.

Second, I occasionally get presented with an xterm window. This typically happens when some application changes the way they figure out which terminal to launch and suddenly my existing configuration is not enough to indicate that terminator should be used. So they use xterm as a fallback. Having to look at this ugly (default themed) terminal window every now and then created at least some drag to enhance my configuration.

Third, ranger, the file manager I currently use, has recently added support for True Color Image previews. This feature is currently available within xterm and urxvt but not with terminator.

This created enough incentive for me to search for fixes to the above issues and, indeed, for urxvt all of them can be solved. In the following, I will first briefly describe how to configure urxvt to make it look better, to address functional issues and finally how to set the default terminal for non-desktop-environment systems.

Theming xterm and urxvt

As is true for many linux topics, the archwiki has wonderful articles on xterm and on urxvt explaining most of what you will want to know. This is a short summary on what I'm using here:

xterm and urxvt can be configured with Xresources. The settings are defined in a file named ~/.Xresources and must be (re-)loaded using the command xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources. If starting your window manager via the startx command add the following lines to your ~/.xinitrc near the top (before exec-ing the window manager itself):

[ -f "$HOME/.Xresources" ] && xrdb -merge "$HOME/.Xresources"

I prefer Source Code Pro over the default fonts used by xterm and urxvt. Note that this font must be installed separately in archlinux:

pacman -S adobe-source-code-pro-fonts

You can now configure your shiny new font to be used by adding the following lines to the file:

XTerm*faceName: Source Code Pro
XTerm*faceSize: 13

URxvt.font: xft:Source Code Pro:size=13

To change the color palette in both xterm and urxvt add the following lines handling both terminals at once:

! Colors for XTerm+URxvt and maybe other terminals:
*background: #002010
*foreground: #a08080
*cursorColor: #aaaaaa
! This colormap is copied from terminators builtin *Ambience* scheme
! (see /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/terminatorlib/prefseditor.py):
*color0: #2e3436
*color1: #cc0000
*color2: #4e9a06
*color3: #c4a000
*color4: #3465a4
*color5: #75507b
*color6: #06989a
*color7: #d3d7cf
*color8: #555753
*color9: #ef2929
*color10: #8ae234
*color11: #fce94f
*color12: #729fcf
*color13: #ad7fa8
*color14: #34e2e2
*color15: #eeeeec

Fixing scroll problem

On archlinux, there is a AUR package that you can install instead of the plain urxvt package, which fixes the pager scrolling issue :

yaourt -S rxvt-unicode-better-wheel-scrolling

Then add the following configuration to your ~/.Xresources:

URxvt.secondaryScreen: 1
URxvt.secondaryScroll: 0
URxvt.secondaryWheel: 1

This information is taken from the archwiki article's section on Scrollback buffer in secondary screen.

Fixing key combinations

At this point, the last major remaining issue is that key combinations with Control/Shift and Arrow keys as well as function keys don't work properly with VIM. To my relief, I found a great blog entry Uvxrt - Vim Arrow- and End-key Problem that lists a comprehensive list of keysym substitutions that will fix the problem if added to your ~/.Xresources file.

Setting the default terminal

Unfortunately, there is not a single standard location to define the default terminal to be used across your system. Rather, the configuration for almost every tool that launches terminals or terminal-based applications must be updated independently. You should at least update the following settings if you have the corresponding programs installed.

First, you obviously have to set the correct terminal for the launchers of terminal-based applications in

• menus
• quick launch icons
• hotkeys

If you use awesome as your window manager too, you likely have to configure your ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua to accomplish this. It's probably wise to use the same launch function for all these use-cases, so you don't need to update more than one or two lines when switching the terminal.

For ranger and mimeopen put the following lines somewhere near the top of your ~/.zprofile if your shell is zsh or in ~/.bash_profile if you use bash:

# Used by ranger. Note that ranger doesn't handle absolute pathes.
export TERMCMD="urxvt"

# Used by mimeopen when launching applications with Terminal=true:
export TERMINAL="urxvt -e"
# export TERMINAL="terminator -x"   # for  terminator

xdg-open as of version 1.1.1 never launches a new terminal on its own, so there is currently no separate configuration for this tool. On the other hand this means that you had to specify the terminal command in every .desktop file describing a terminal-based application. Therefore, you may need to update several desktop files in ~/.local/share/applications.

Note that xdg-open and mimeopen use different files to infer the default applications. If you want to share the same set of default applications, you should create the following symlink:

ln -s ~/.local/share/applications/{mimeapps,defaults}.list

Other programs: There may be further steps to take depending on the exakt set of software that is in use on your system. If you would like to add something to the list please don't hesitate to send me an email.