Rxvt
lastmod 2020-08-23created 2020-08-232 edits
rxvt is a terminal emulator for the X Window System (for Windows, it is distributed as a Cygwin port). It was originally written by Rob Nation, and was later extensively modified by Mark Olesen through maintenance over several years. It was designed to be lightweight by removing rarely used features of xterm, such as Tektronix 4014 emulation and toolkit-style configuration. The latter refers to the Xt resource structure, such as key bindings. rxvt is an extended version of the old xvt terminal emulator by John Bovey of the University of Kent. The name originally stood for Robert's xvt, but later changed to stand for "our xvt". (pronounced as the letters r-x-v-t)
About
Setting aside features such as those controlled by resource files, rxvt's terminal emulation differs from xterm in two important respects.
- It emulates a VT102, not a VT220. This means that it handles 8-bit data differently and does not add the C1 controls that xterm can handle. xterm does not have a "-k8" switch to disable that feature. rxvt does not provide an option to emulate a VT220.
- The strings it sends for command keys are different. xterm sends strings encoded using the same rules as ANSI/ISO escape sequences. rxvt provides comparable compatibility and flexibility, but does not send them directly.
Newer versions of rxvt natively support pseudo-transparency.
The rxvt distribution also includes an analog clock program called rclock. Very old distributions included a copy of vttest, but it has not been provided since version 2.18 in 1996.
Forks
- aterm (from rxvt 2.4.8) created for use with the AfterStep window manager (no longer maintained)
- Eterm (from rxvt 2.21) created for use with Enlightenment
- mrxvt (from rxvt 2.7.11) created for multiple tabs and additional features (latest version released in 2008-09-10)
- urxvt (rxvt-unicode) (from rxvt 2.7.11)
- Wterm, designed for NeXTSTEP style window managers such as Window Maker