Tux Training

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I have always resented the fact that my terminal-based systems running under X incur a rather hefty price in the way of one instance of urxvt per application, which in turn implies one instance of bash per application. (One of these days I’ll get off my rear end and pick a shell that isn’t quite as hefty, relatively speaking, as bash. Suggestions welcomed. )

I had been using dmenu in Musca to start applications with urxvt -e (application), and each time I saw options for both urxvtd and urxvtc. A quick skim through some man pages, and now I understand that urxvtd is the daemon, and urxvtc triggers the daemon to spawn a new terminal window.

Which means that instead of four terminal emulators taking up a wide slice of the 16Mb I have in this Pentium, I have one daemon running and four applications hooked into it.

Why bother? Well for me, as I have already implied, the amount of space required is suddenly a fraction, inversely proportional to the number of emulators you originally needed. (That makes almost no sense at all, but suffice to say that when I ran tty-clock, centerim and hnb alongside charm, I used to need four terminals and four instances of bash to run them. Now I need only one daemon, which I suppose suggests it takes up one-quarter of the resources. … )

Continue reading ‘Reducing memory use with urxvtd and urxvtc’ »

I’ve done a lot over the past few months to make my time spent on the command line a bit more enjoyable and easier to use.  Hopefully you’ll find these steps useful as well.

Continue reading ‘How to have a lightweight, beautiful, functional terminal’ »

rxvt-unicode (commonly called urxvt) already has 88 color support, and for most things, this is fine. But sometimes you just want a tad more, maybe for vim color themes.

So here’s my build log of compiling rxvt-unicode with the 256 color patch on Ubuntu Hardy, and debianizing (packaging) it.

Continue reading ‘Get rxvt-unicode with 256 color support on Ubuntu’ »

Using urxvt / rxvt-unicode very often as my prefered terminal emulator I thought it would be nice to have clickable links. Reading through the manpage and searching in google I found out about the built in urxvt’s perl extensions and that this was possible.

Just add the following to your .Xdefaults:

URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,matcher
URxvt.urlLauncher: firefox
URxvt.matcher.button: 2
URxvt.matcher.pattern.1: \\bwww\\.[\\w-]\\.[\\w./?&@#-]*[\\w/-]

Now you just need to replace firefox with your favorite browsers startup script and choose which mousebutton should be handled. Button 2 is the middle mouse button and clicking a link with it now opens it directly in firefox without copy and paste or other timewasting things

After you’re done with the file simply run:

xrdb -all ~/.Xresources

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