Simplify invoking urxvt terminal from commandline.

Motivation for creating this little script was to have ability to simply run urxvt with predefined features (like icons/font size/perl script list etc), without providing a ton of parameters nor keeping track of resources in ~/.Xdefaults file.

Installation

Simply put the script preferably in your $PATH.

There are a few dependencies:

• Python

• fc-list from fontconfig package

• urxvt obviously (package is often called rxvt-unicode) built with XFT support.

• using --tabbedalt switch requires tabbedalt plugin.

Also, there are three fonts internally used:

• Symbola - Font with rich set of emoji glyphs

• Unifont - Bitmap font with rich set of unicode glyphs

• DejaVu Sans - which provides several more unicode glyphs

All these fonts will be concatenated with the main font(s). If you don't have any of them, that's ok, they simply be filtered out. Although, I would recommend to install them to be able to display unusual glyphs/emoji.

Configuration

There are several environment variables available to be put in ~/.bashrc or such, which will have an impact on the defaults wrapper have. So here is the list of variables, with their default values:

• URXVT_BMP: [empty] - Font to be used as bitmap font (like font-misc-misc from xorg, or terminus) before all the font defined in URXVT_TTF. You need to provide valid xft name for the font, so it is basically a convenient way for having bitmap font available to use with --bitmap switch, for details see below.

• URXVT_ICON_PATH: ~/.urxvt/icons - Path for icons images.

• URXVT_ICON: [empty] - Icon to be used with the terminal.

• URXVT_PERL_EXT: url-select,keyboard-select,font-size,color-themes - Comma separated list of perl extensions for the urxvt.

• URXVT_RUN_DIRECT: false - Urxvt can be run using simply urxvt executable or with daemon (urxvtd) and client (urxvtc). By default the latter will be chosen for launching new terminal. Note, that you don't need to manually run urxvtd - it will be run automatically on absence.

• URXVT_SIZE: 14 - font size. It's applied to all fonts.

• URXVT_TTF: [empty] - Font or comma separated font list to be used. Note, that first font become main font, and the others will be used for glyphs that are missing from the previous one. That makes the order of the selected fonts crucial. See below for examples.

Usage

Simplest case is just to run it without any parameter (assuming script is somewhere in $PATH:

$ urxvt.py

To run urxvt with Hack Nerd Font and Webdings xft fonts:

$ urxvt.py -f 'Hack Nerd Font Mono,Webdings'

If you wondering how to look for the particular font name, you can use fc-list command. Let's try to look for the Hack Nerd font:

$ fc-list|grep -i hack
/home/gryf/.fonts/Nerd Fonts/Hack Italic Nerd Font Complete Mono.ttf: Hack Nerd Font Mono:style=Italic
/home/gryf/.fonts/Nerd Fonts/Hack Bold Italic Nerd Font Complete Mono.ttf: Hack Nerd Font Mono:style=Bold Italic
/home/gryf/.fonts/Nerd Fonts/Hack Regular Nerd Font Complete Mono.ttf: Hack Nerd Font Mono:style=Regular
/home/gryf/.fonts/Nerd Fonts/Hack Bold Nerd Font Complete Mono.ttf: Hack Nerd Font Mono:style=Bold

there are four files found. Every line can be divided using colon as a separator. First part of the line is the complete path to the font, then there is a comma separated list of names of the font and finally comma separated style list after style= keyword. For this example, name of the font is common for all four files, and the difference is in style only, and the name is Hack Nerd Font Mono.

To use bitmap font (which still be used through the xft library, and defined as such), assuming that URXVT_BMP env variable contain name of the font (for example Misc Fixed) , it is simple enough to:

$ urxvt.py -b

Note, that this is exactly the same as:

$ urxvt.py -f 'Misc Fixed'

For more options, issue:

$ urxvt.py -h

to see complete list of supported parameters.

Finally, you can pass all valid urxvt options to the executable. Just use -- delimiter and than use any valid params:

$ urxvt.py -f 'Hack Nerd Font Mono' -n -s 16 -- -cr orange

which set the regular and bold font face to Hack Nerd font with its size set to 16, without any perl extension and cursor color set to orange.

License

This work is licensed under GPL3. See LICENSE file for details.