Customizing Urxvt (rxvt-unicode), that magnificent console

rxvt-unicode or simply urxvtThis is how this magnificent terminal emulator is known.

I have always been a fan of customizing my system, and being a regular user of the console, I had to look for one that met my needs in this regard, so after trying some, I stayed with this one.

I will not explain the way to install it given the diversity of distributions that we handle here, check your repositories to see if it is available for distribution (I am sure that it will be in most cases) or you can also visit the project page.

What we will now see is a small guide on how we can customize it a bit.

Let's start with a brief review

rxvt-unicode is an enhancement of rxvt (another terminal emulator), its name comes from the addition of support for unicodeOne of its notable features is the support for tabs, something that I personally find very useful, it is also very light and has an integrated perl interpreter.

Once we have installed urxvt we will get a perhaps unpleasant surprise when we open it for the first time, and it is that the interface it has is very "neglected", fortunately it is something that we can easily solve.

To do this we must edit the file ~ / .Xdafaults o ~ / .Xresources, depending on which one suits you best. It is worth mentioning that everyone must use their preferred text editor, in my case I will use vim.

$ vim ~ / .Xresources

And we will add the following lines:

# - We specify the colors with which we will work in urxvt, you can make the combinations you like

!Black
URxvt.color0: # 000000
URxvt.color8: # 555753
!Red
URxvt.color1: # 990099
URxvt.color9: # 8E388E
!Green
URxvt.color2: # 4E9A06
URxvt.color10: # 699000
!Yellow
URxvt.color3: # FFA500
URxvt.color11: # FFA500
!Blue
URxvt.color4: # 3465A4
URxvt.color12: # 729FCF
!Magenta
URxvt.color5: # 75507B
URxvt.color13: # AD7FA8
! Cyan
URxvt.color6: # 06989A
URxvt.color14: # 34E2E2
!White
URxvt.color7: #FFFFFF
URxvt.color15: #FFFFFF

# - Window appearance
# | - We specify the title of the window, by default, urxvt
URxvt.title: Console
# | - We add a custom icon, which must be in the address we specify
URxvt.iconFile: /usr/share/icons/consola.svg
# | - We remove the scroll bars (I personally don't like them)
URxvt.scrollBar: false
# | - We add transparency
URxvt.depth: 32
URxvt.background: [80] # 000000
# | - We define the main color (letters)
URxvt.foreground: # 699000
# | - We define the cursor color
URxvt.cursorColor: # 699000
# | - We add blinking to the cursor
URxvt.cursorBlink: true
# | - We define the type of font to use (to get a complete list of fonts available on your system use "fc-list" on your console).
URxvt.font: xft: Terminus: pixelsize = 12
# | - If there is separation between characters add, where -1 is the number of pixels to decrease
URxvt.letterSpace: -1
# | - Added support for tabs
URxvt.perl-ext-commoni: default, tabbed
# | - We define the background color of the tabs
URxvt.tabbed.tab-bg: # 000000
# | - We define the frontal color of the eyelashes
URxvt.tabbed.tab-fg: # 699000
# | - We define the background color of the tab separators
URxvt.tabbed.tabbar-bg: # 000000
# | - We define the front color of the tab separators
URxvt.tabbed.tabbar-fg: # 4E9A06

Now we save and restart or reload using [b] xrdb [/ b] doing

xrdb ~/.Xresources

o

xrdb ~/.Xdefaults

and we will have a terminal similar to this:

Handling Hexadecimal Colors

There is a large number of pages that help us with the handling of hexadecimal colors to be able to make combinations according to what we consider appropriate, I recommend visiting this page.

Managing the tabs

Open a new tab:

There are two ways to create new tabs, one of them is by clicking with the mouse on the option [NEW] in the upper left corner of our console and the other is with the combination of keys SHIFT + Down arrow key.

Close current tab:

CTRL + D key combination

Change tab:

SHIFT + Left cursor key or SHIFT + Right cursor key, as the case may be.

Other references

For further reference on the customization options offered by urxvt we can visit your Official Site or we can make use of the man pages  from our console.

You may also be interested in visiting

Urxvt on the Arch wiki
 Urxvt on the Crunchbang wiki
 Urxvt on a Fedora blog
 Urxvt on a Debian blog
 Urxvt on the Ciberterminal blog