= 2026-05-07 Thursday =

=== URXVT compile notes

I found last year that the current packaged version of rxvt-unicode
aka "urvt" has a bug that affects its behaviour with the DWM window
manager. When you close a "stack" window (assuming there's more
than one open) the remaining rxvt's prompt postion is stuck at
halfway (or so) down the window.

I found that it was possible to self-compile an earlier version of
urxvt that didn't have this bug, and I've been using it for a while
now.

I used the source for rxvt-unicode-9.30 and I'll leave a copy here
in case I lose my own.

I then noticed that it wouldn't display characters with ansi escape
colors above the basic selection (16 colours?) when I ran VF1 - the
command prompt should be a red coloured VF1> but it's missing.

I switched to using LXTerminal for a while to get around this
problem, but I found that LXTerminal won't embed w3m image previews
when using the "ranger" file manager.

ST does, urxvt does, pretty much everything does. LXTerminal
doesn't.

So I went back to the pre-packaged Debian current urxvt to test. It
works fine 

- w3m image previews in Ranger - OK
- icon/glyphs for file/directory types in Ranger - OK
- 256 colors - eg prompt in VF1 - OK

it still has the "prompt not resetting to the top" bug though, which
is annoying.

So I recompiled my own version of 9.30, and played with the
configure options until I found a set that works for all the cases
above.

This is

-----------------------------------8<------------------------------

./configure --enable-everything --disable-perl --enable-256-color


make & sudo make install

---------------->8------------------------------------------------

job done. 

Urxvt works now in DWM, scrolling, 256 colours, icon/glyphs, w3m
image preview in Ragner. 

I'll also leave my .Xdefaults for getting rxvt to look the way I
prefer, too....

Look in the Files section below.