A few quick points: 1. Tabs now work brilliantly thanks to Michael Traxler's enhanced version of the tabbedex plugin.
Downside: the screen flashes in a lovely seizure-inducing way if you have more than one tab open and a relatively complex layout on both tabs. This is identical to the 'visual bell' feature -- only tab-flashing is definitely not a feature (and also probably not Michael Traxler's fault, as you'll see below). "Complex" here means a multipane tmux instance in one tab and an editor (vim or emacs) in the other. Not really all that complex, but for some reason urxvt can't handle it without giving the user a nasty raster-burn surprise for your eyeballs every time you switch tabs. 2. Vim now freezes unpredictably. Solution: wrapped vim in a tmux instance and use the command 'respawn-pane -k' to restart the editor without having to destroy all tabs and completely restart the terminal. This is Very Bad News and will almost certainly be the end of urvxt for me if it ever freezes before I can save my data. Idea: it would be useful to be able to kill one tab without having to kill them all and start over. Better Idea: vim should never freeeze unpredictably due to the terminal inexplicably deciding to go out to lunch. This has happened twice in one day and will be a major issue if it doesn't turn out to be manageable with some kind of workaround (or better yet, a real solution). 3. Some fonts do not properly display several characters (glyphs). Solution: no easy answer. This is a flaw in urvxt, due to the fact that the font in question "just works" in Gnome and KDE (i.e. Konsole). I think urxvt's buggy XFT font rendering may also be the cause of the flashing in point number 1. It may be an issue caused by slow redraw -- and again, since KDE and GNOME have no problem displaying similar screen output, the correct answer is not "XFT is slow" or "your font's glyphs are too imperfect for proper rendering". My fallback font still looks okay, but the text vaguely resembles a movie-style kidnapper's ransom note -- letters out of place, missized and misaligned here or there. Not optimal, to say the least. --- All in all, urxvt works well. Unfortunately, it suffers from a common problem: the "interesting" issues (like how to design and implement cool Perl extensions, for example) are given priority over obvious "boring" questions that are far more mundane and basic, yet important as well (like how to get fonts to render properly even if the glyphs weren't ideally designed). Ultimately, urxvt is good, but not great (yet). Hope my notes are of some use to someone. I'll probably repost them to the upcoming blog as well. Cheers. . . . . . ____________________________________________________________ FREE 3D MARINE AQUARIUM SCREENSAVER - Watch dolphins, sharks & orcas on your desktop! Check it out at http://www.inbox.com/marineaquarium _______________________________________________ rxvt-unicode mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schmorp.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rxvt-unicode
