From: Marc Espie <marc.espie.openbsd@gmail.com>
Subject: urvt vs xterm
To: ports@openbsd.org
Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2026 22:09:00 +0200

I've recently started using urxvt instead of xterm everywhere,
in major part because xterm was losing glyphs, and after a few months
of not figuring out why (and asking the guys in charge of X11 and drm
I didn't get any useful answer for my setup) I decided to switch.

One major issue of urxvt is that it's feature-full, and also it has no
menu.

I'm very regularly using two scripts with escape sequences: sz

#! /bin/sh
fontsize=$1
: ${fontsize:=14}
exec printf '\33]50;%s\007' xft:LucidaConsole:rgba=rgb:pixelsize=$fontsize


and c (to restore cursor after mpv fucked up with it):

#! /bin/sh
# steady, visible cursor
exec printf '\33[?12l\33[?25h'

Apart from that, urxvt didn't like my mixed shortcuts wrt fvwm2, stuff
handling Ctrl-Shift.

Finally figured out it was just a question of setting:

Rxvt.iso14755_52: false


Any other trick I should know ?

I admit, having full unicode display is rad, and some of the other stuff
of urxvt is cool.

I still need to find how to paste everything everytime (I hate having to
push "p" all the time)

I think it has nice bindings to about anywhere...

One minor peeve (@afresh1): it would be swell if the perl libraries were
better synched with the ports tree. I started with the urxvt perl flavor,
but unfortunately, bad perl synch wrt libraries left me with no usable
terminal so for now, I'm back with the base system.

I'm pretty sure the requirements are a bit too stringent and it should be
possible to get back to something that works without having to switch back
to xterm temporarily.

Baring that, maybe it's possible to make urxvt+perl "soft fail" to "plain"
urxvt in case it can't load the perl runtime ?

-- 
	Marc