# urxvt no more

I've been a urxvt user for a long time. It supported unicode, I could
hide the scrollbars to gain a clean looking terminal, have a blinking 
block cursor and there were flags to make the launched terminals
login terminals so my environment would be set correctly.

As I mostly live in the terminal these days, maybe it is only natural
that this piece of software comes under scrutiny. urxvt is quite a
bit lighter than xterm but usually xterm is already included as part
of the xorg package on most systems. You are saving nothing without
you manually delete it.

Yesterday I decided to take a look at suckless's st (simple
terminal). It is minute in comparison to either xterm or urxvt. 

I had stayed away from suckless software as I don't agree with
recompiling for changes of basic settings, like fonts or colours.
After looking through some of the patches available however, I found
that there was an xresources patch to allow settings for fonts and
colours to be taken from the generic .Xresources file. 

This seemed a very reasonable thing to do and convinced me that maybe
it was worth a try.


## Configuration

First I amended the config.mk file as I'm running on OpenBSD. You
have to uncomment some OpenBSD specific lines in the file and remove
'-lrt' from the LIBS line. It wasn't obvious I had to do this, but
thankfully the included FAQ covers it. I then downloaded and applied
the xresources patch where I ran into more problems.

Firstly it failed to compile. I later discovered that the patch
applied changes to config.def.h and if you have already compiled the
application this file does not get moved to config.h. It doesn't
overwrite config.h so that it doesn't stomp on any changes you have
made. So while sensible, it's not obvious when I applied the patch
why I was seeing errors and it wouldn't compile.

Once I had got it to install the colouration was not what I expected.
The entire text was the colour of my cursor on urxvt. I later
discovered that the numeric colour values used in the patch were not
correct looking at those statically set in the header. Once I
realized the issue and corrected the values it worked as expected.

I made a patch for the patch and emailed the patch author along with
an explanation, so hopefully this will be fixed soon.

I had intended to add a URI opening patch to match the functionality
I had with urxvt but I had an alternative[0] way of opening URI's
which was good enough to not warrant the extra patch.


## Summary

The st terminal is fast and responsive and my chosen font looks
somewhat better than on urxvt.  

The only thing I feel missing is my blinking cursor. There is a patch
for it, but I will give it some time before deciding. I do tend to
lose my cursor in large documents and the blinking orange block is
good at drawing the eye.


## References

[0](gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Computing/URI-open--plumber-and-xclip.md)