mrxvt – A lighter weight terminal to run programs like alsamixer or ceni

[Moderator BobC]

Skidoo suggested xvt. I tried it, but couldn’t figure out how to get alsamixer in color.

But that prompted me to search…

mrxvt – it doesn’t have a daemon/client mode, but is using less than 1mb, about 1/2 that of stterm (suckless), but more than xvt. It took about 940k per session. It took a lot of effort to configure because either the documentation is incorrect or I just wasn’t following it correctly. It handled color well.
https://linux.die.net/man/1/mrxvt

urxvt – its well supported and if run in daemon/client mode its pretty efficient, and handled color well, so I put a little script I found in /usr/local/bin and called it urxvtm and made it executable. It took about 6.2mb per session. Maybe I did something wrong, but it doesn’t seem to give back the memory after you exit the window, either, so if you open and close them, it keeps increasing.

#!/bin/sh

# urxvtm - create/run multiple urxvt sessions running from urxvtd daemon 

if ! [urxvtc "$@"]; then
  urxvtd -q -o -f
  urxvtc "$@"
fi

lxterminal – default in AntiX17 full. Its nice, but took 7.5mb per session.

mrxvt was the winner in my book in bang for the buck terms.

• This topic was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by BobC.
• This topic was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by BobC.
• This topic was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by BobC.

[Anonymous]

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Unsure what counts as a “session” in your reckoning. Do you mean “per each windowed instance”?
With the tabbed terminal emulators, each new tab likely consumes less resources than launching multiple windowed instances of whatever terminal application.

Skidoo suggested xvt.

Ouch. That suggestion was specific to the context of the other topic. It’s far-removed from my choice of daily driver.
FWIW, instead of recommending use of a particular terminal emulator, what I “suggest” is to explore, tryout every available terminal emulator app, and use whichever (not necessarily just one) suits you.

===============

“mrxvt”
I have several collected bookmarks… and an overall impression that it became a red-headed stepchild due to its lack of unicode support.
http://materm.sourceforge.net/wiki/Main/Documentation
https://github.com/sahid/mrxvt-unicode/blob/master/README.configure
https://packages.debian.org/stretch/mrxvt-mini
https://github.com/bjbarcla/mrxvt/tree/wiki
https://github.com/razvanm/mrxvt
https://github.com/dylex/drxvt

regarding urxvt (aka “rxvt-unicode”)
check out these oldforums archived topics:
rocking-urxvt-with-style-t5048.html
https://antixlinux.com/forum-archive/reasonable-urxvt-terminal-defaults-font-and-font-s-t4420.html
https://antixlinux.com/forum-archive/urxvt-settings-t5033.html
https://antixlinux.com/forum-archive/tabs-in-urxvt-t1595.html
also, here are a couple bookmarked refs:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Rxvt-unicode/Tips_and_tricks
http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/rxvt-unicode.html

[Moderator BobC]

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Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend. xvt is very light indeed, but for me I need a terminal capable of running programs like alsamixer, mc, ceni, or programs like them, making them look readable, and to me, for alsamixer or mc, that requires color.

Actually, I tried all the ones in the repos that had the word light or small in them. It would be great if someone were to suggest a better light one to try.

I counted memory used on the basis of clicking a button on the toolbar or menu or run command to simulate me using it to run alsamixer or ncdu or whatever terminal based menu program, not on the basis of tabs unless the program automatically added a tab as a result, which none did. I admit that I didn’t think about how much could be saved by running them as new tabs and finding another way to run the commands.

Sorry, I’m not familiar with unicode.

Again, I didn’t mean to offend, I was just happy to save 50 or 75 mb, as I typically have at least few terminal sessions going, although over time that is in decline as newer programs appear and improve.

[Anonymous]

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no offense taken, I was just providing clarification.
I have a keen interest in terminal emulator applications, in general, and I monitor new activity in that space.
In particular, I’m interested in “python + vte” apps, e.g.
(splittable ui: terminator, terra)
(tabbed ui: guake, older deepin-terminal)

[Forum Admin Dave]

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Not sure how much of this applies, was browsing the forum archive… lot there.
https://antixlinux.com/forum-archive/deal-with-color-text-on-the-command-line-t4017.html
https://antixlinux.com/forum-archive/urxvt-settings-t5033.html
https://antixlinux.com/forum-archive/fancy-bash-prompts-made-easy-t3074.html

Computers are like air conditioners. They work fine until you start opening Windows. ~Author Unknown

[Moderator BobC]

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Here is what I came up with for a simple config for mrxvt-mini. I had problems trying to make it ~/.mrxvtrc so replaced /etc/mrxvt/mrxvtrc with it, and that worked. It’s setup to use xclip and the clipboard buffer for external sharing as well as paste the current selection without needing to copy it first. With that mod I’m now able to use it for all terminal sessions.

# Number of lines to save in the scroll back buffer for all tabs
Mrxvt.saveLines:		2000

# NOTE: Macros defined with class Mrxvt or XTerm will NOT replace existing
# macros. So user macros will not be replaced.
Mrxvt.macro.Ctrl+Shift+F11:	    	ToggleFullscreen
# Scrolling
Mrxvt.macro.Primary+Shift+Up:		Scroll -1
Mrxvt.macro.Primary+Shift+Down:		Scroll +1
Mrxvt.macro.Primary+Shift+Home:		Scroll -1000000
Mrxvt.macro.Primary+Shift+End:		Scroll +1000000
# Font size
Mrxvt.macro.Ctrl+equal:			ResizeFont +1
Mrxvt.macro.Ctrl+minus:			ResizeFont -1
# By default we should only have Ctrl+Shift modifier keys defined. Other
# modifier combinations are sometimes used by the window manager, or
# applications (e.g. emacs).
# Help
Mrxvt.macro.Ctrl+Shift+F1:		NewTab "man mrxvt" man mrxvt
# Tabs
# Open a new tab. Rather make this a shortcut that duplicates the current profile.
Mrxvt.macro.Ctrl+Shift+n:		NewTab -
Mrxvt.macro.Shift+Delete:		SetTitle
Mrxvt.macro.Ctrl+Shift+Left:		MoveTab -1
Mrxvt.macro.Ctrl+Shift+Right:		MoveTab +1
# Previous active tab
Mrxvt.macro.Ctrl+Tab:			GotoTab 0
# Pasting
Mrxvt.macro.Shift+Insert:		Paste
# A selection buffer can be added as an argument (PRIMARY,SECONDARY, CLIPBOARD)
Mrxvt.macro.Ctrl+Shift+V: Paste CLIPBOARD
Mrxvt.macro.Ctrl+Shift+C: Exec !/usr/bin/xclip -o | /usr/bin/xclip -selection clipboard

Mrxvt.showMenu: false

# Tab bar colors
Mrxvt.itabBackground:	    #101010
Mrxvt.tabBackground:	    #900000
Mrxvt.itabForeground:	    #909090
Mrxvt.tabForeground:	    #9a9a9a

# Scroll bar colors
Mrxvt.scrollColor:      #808080
Mrxvt.troughColor:      #202020

# Cursor
Mrxvt.cursorBlink:      true
Mrxvt.cursorColor:      #00ff00
Mrxvt.cursorColor2:     #000000

# Setup colors for a black background.
Mrxvt.background:    #000000
Mrxvt.foreground:    #ffffff

Mrxvt.color0:        #000000
Mrxvt.color1:        #af0000
Mrxvt.color2:        #00af00
Mrxvt.color3:        #afaf00
Mrxvt.color4:        #0000af
Mrxvt.color5:        #af00af
Mrxvt.color6:        #00afaf
Mrxvt.color7:        #9a9a9a
Mrxvt.color8:        #5f5f5f
Mrxvt.color9:        #d70000
Mrxvt.color10:       #00d700
Mrxvt.color11:       #d7d700
###Mrxvt.color12:       #0000d7
Mrxvt.color12:       #729FCF
Mrxvt.color13:       #d700d7
Mrxvt.color14:       #00d7d7
Mrxvt.color15:       #d7d7d7

# Display bold and underlined text in color, rather than using the terminal
# attributes. This makes reading man pages a little easier.
Mrxvt.colorBD:       #00afaf
Mrxvt.colorUL:       #00af00

# Display the X selection as highlighted instead of using reverse video. 
#####Mrxvt.highlightColor:   #303060
Mrxvt.highlightColor:   #306030

Mrxvt.bottomTabbar:     True
Mrxvt.scrollbarRight:   True

# Default shading to use when run with -tr
Mrxvt.shading:		80

[Moderator BobC]

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mrxvt doesn’t support unicode, and I guess that’s why Midnight Commander’s line draw characters turn to weird characters, but I found a way to fix it by calling it with:

LANG=C mc

Well anyway, I found a page from one of the mrxvt developers that suggested a nicer solution….

Using UTF-8 in mrxvt, even though mrxvt doesn’t support it
2014-09-14

I use mrxvt (see also the SourceForge page) as my terminal emulator. I’ve contributed a lot of code and took over development of mrxvt 10 years ago. However I ran out of free time, and don’t code for it anymore. I do still use it every day, and it doesn’t have any bugs that affect me… however it does lack utf8 support. (We have an experimental utf8 branch, but never managed to make it usable.)

Even though I mainly use an ISO 8859-1 encoding, I’ve run into enough UTF-8 files that I needed to do something about it. Here are a few things I’ve done that allows me to keep using mrxvt and interact correctly with UTF-8.
Setting the LANG environment variable.

Put the following in ~/.mrxvtrc:

Mrxvt.profile0.command: \!LANG=en_US exec $SHELL

Now all terminal processes in mrxvt will have LANG set to something mrxvt supports. (I know this isn’t UTF-8. That comes later.)

http://www.math.cmu.edu/~gautam/sj/blog/20140914-utf8.html

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