Exoterm

A fork of the great rxvt-unicode (urxvt) plus a few extras. Still lean, X11 only.

What Exoterm does

It includes everything what makes urxvt great: low CPU usage, low latency, fast output, daemon mode, etc. On top of it, adds:

• Native tabs — tab bar with mouse support, fully managed in C (no Perl)
• Split panes — horizontal/vertical pane splitting
• Minimap — scrollback overview panel with viewport indicator
• Prompt markers — tracks shell prompt positions for navigation with keyboard shortcuts
• True 24-bit color — full RGB888 support beyond the standard 256-color cube
• Native searchable scrollback — incremental search bar implemented in C
• Sixel image support — inline image rendering via DCS sixel sequences
• Native URL detection and click-to-open — no Perl extension required
• Improved input handling — key encoding closer to xterm for better TUI/Vim/tmux compatibility
• Drag-and-drop — XDND protocol support for dropping files/text into the terminal
• Settings pane — graphical settings panel accessible at runtime
• Right-click context menu — context-sensitive actions on selected text
• Auto copy selection — copies text to clipboard on selection (xterm-style, configurable)
• Shift+Enter — sends line feed (\n) separately from Enter (\r), useful in some TUI applications

It's also synced with these changes from the upstream repo:

• Wide glyph rendering (ENABLE_WIDE_GLYPHS)
• Improved 24-bit to 256 color mapping
• SGR mouse mode (1006), extended mouse reporting (1015), DECRQM (mode query)
• Bracketed paste mode
• Background image support with compositing

What Exoterm does not:

• Include the perl stuff from urxvt by default (you must enable it via --enable-perl)
• Use 150MB of RAM just to show you a prompt, like other new terminals
• Touch your precious GPU at any moment
• Bundle stuff like a "Markdown editor" just because
• Require you to launch a daemon on boot so it can start fast

Why not just use ____?

Because a terminal should not consume RAM like a browser tab does, period. I want mine to open up in less than a second. And urxvt delivers exactly that.

Plus, being light on resources and not requiring a GPU means you can use it anywhere, even in your old laptop from yesteryear.

How can I use this in Wayland?

You can't, sorry.

But I hear that foot is pretty lightweight and minimal. ;)

Why does the font look so crisp?

Such wow, right? It's because I am using a bitmap (aka 'pixel') font.

That one in particular is Terminus. You can see more of them here.

Download/Install

Good question. I don't provide binary packages at the moment, but you can build it in a second or two.

How to build

First, install dependencies. These are

• libxmu-dev
• libxpm-dev
• libxft-dev (for xft fonts and/or full transparency)
• libxrender-dev
• libstartup-notification0-dev

For Ubuntu/Debian, this command does it:

sudo apt install libxpm-dev libxft-dev libxrender-dev libxmu-dev libstartup-notification0-dev

Then, clone the repo and initialize submodules:

git clone https://github.com/tomas/exoterm
cd exoterm
git submodule init
git submodule update

Configure and build:

./configure
make
sudo make install

Run ./configure -h to see all options. See README.configure for details. A few quick examples:

./configure --disable-24-bit-color (if you prefer 256 color)
./configure --disable-xft (if you don't need XFT and can do without full transparency)
./configure --enable-perl (if you want support for perl extensions)

Note: make sure to run make clean before make after changing compile options.

Settings

Exoterm provides a GUI for changing (most of) the available options. In the same spirit as urxvt, Exoterm reads the values from ~/.Xdefaults. You can use either Exoterm or Urxvt as a prefix for each option.

If you edit the .Xdefaults file, make sure to run xrdb ~/.Xdefaults so new values are read.

Here's an example configuration:

! main
Exoterm.loginShell: true
Exoterm.geometry: 100x25
Exoterm.foreground: #fff
Exoterm.cursorColor: #ff6600

! font (Terminus 8x16)
Exoterm.font: -xos4-terminus-medium-r-normal--16-160-72-72-c-80-iso10646-1
Exoterm.boldFont: -xos4-terminus-bold-r-normal--16-160-72-72-c-80-iso10646-1

! 80% opaque black background with a 10% opaque tint of cyan
URxvt.blackOpacity: 80
URxvt.background: #0ff
URxvt.bgOpacity: 10

! borders
Exoterm.internalBorder: 10
Exoterm.externalBorder: 0
Exoterm.borderLess: false

! scrollback
Exoterm.saveLines: 10000
Exoterm.jumpScroll: true
Exoterm.skipScroll: true
Exoterm.scrollBar: false
Exoterm.scrollTtyOutput: false
Exoterm.scrollWithBuffer: true
Exoterm.scrollTtyKeypress: true

Colors

Example using a Dracula-based palette:

Exoterm.color0:  #000000
Exoterm.color8:  #4D4D4D
Exoterm.color1:  #FF5555
Exoterm.color9:  #FF798C
Exoterm.color2:  #50FAB2
Exoterm.color10: #5AF78E
Exoterm.color3:  #F1FA8C
Exoterm.color11: #F4F99D
Exoterm.color4:  #BD93F9
Exoterm.color12: #CAA9FA
Exoterm.color5:  #FF79C6
Exoterm.color13: #FF9AF4
Exoterm.color6:  #8BE9FD
Exoterm.color14: #9AEDFE
Exoterm.color7:  #BFBFBF
Exoterm.color15: #E6E6E6

Misc

Installing Terminus Powerline fonts

wget https://github.com/powerline/fonts/raw/master/Terminus/PCF/ter-powerline-x16b.pcf.gz
wget https://github.com/powerline/fonts/raw/master/Terminus/PCF/ter-powerline-x16n.pcf.gz

fonts_dir=/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc
sudo cp ter-powerline-x16b.pcf.gz ter-powerline-x16n.pcf.gz $fonts_dir
sudo mkfontdir $fonts_dir
xset +fp $fonts_dir

Make sure $fonts_dir is listed in the FontPath section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Borderless window in JWM

<Group>
  <Class>Exoterm</Class>
  <Option>noborder</Option>
  <Option>notitle</Option>
</Group>

Credits

To the rxvt and unicode-rxvt developers, of course. I'm just a humble servant.

License

GPLv3, as the original source.