Solved Problems switching to Urxvt as the preferred terminal in XFCE

[carlcaulkett]

Hello. In an attempt to gain access to Unicode characters from the terminal I have attempted to switch to Urxvt as my terminal application. It's been quite successful so far. This is what my terminal screen looks like now...

(Just as an aside, ralphbsz, you'll notice that the prompt is showing a % even though I used your trick of using %#. What have I missed here?)

My main problem is that, at the moment, I am forced to start this terminal from the standard Xfce terminal using an alias, specified in my .zshrc file...

If I transfer the urxvt parameters to their rightful place within ~/.Xresources, the -letsp -6 option becomes URxvt*letterSpace: -6. The problem is that the letter space parameter is not honoured, and the terminal looks like this...

This is also what happens if I specify Urxvt as the preferred terminal application within Settings -> Preferred Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal Emulator. I'm going to attempt to change the start parameters within settings. I'll post back with the results...

 

[carlcaulkett]

No, that hasn't worked. I tried with urxvt "-letsp -6" and just urxvt -letsp -6 as the options. Neither way worked. So at the moment the only way I can start the urxvt terminal with a decent display is to launch it from the standard xfce terminal. It's not the end of the world, but I'm sure it's something obvious that I've missed, and that kinda bothers me!

 

[ralphbsz]

I have no idea about urxvt.

About the zsh prompt, I gave you bad advice, didn't read the manage carefully enough myself. Here is a quote from the man page (it's hidden in man zshmisc):

Shell state
%# A `#' if the shell isrunningwith privileges, a `%' if not.
Equivalent to `%(!.#.%%)'. The definition of `privileged', for
these purposes,is that eitherthe effective user ID is zero,
or, if POSIX.1e capabilities are supported, thatat least one
capability is raised in either the Effectiveor Inheritable
capability vectors.

So by itself, "%#" won't work. But you could try to decode what the equivalent "%(!.#.%%)" really means; I bet it is an if statement built into a variable substitution.

 

[carlcaulkett]

I have no idea about urxvt.

About the zsh prompt, I gave you bad advice, didn't read the manage carefully enough myself. Here is a quote from the man page (it's hidden in man zshmisc):

So by itself, "%#" won't work. But you could try to decode what the equivalent "%(!.#.%%)" really means; I bet it is an if statement built into a variable substitution.

Bad advice, Sir? I am shocked! No worries. I've got a few pages on the subject of prompts bookmarked and I will study them further. I think you are right about the "%(!.#.%%)" construct. This page http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/Prompt-Expansion.html#Conditional-Substrings-in-Prompts suggests that you are. Thanks, that's given me another avenue to pursue!

 

[carlcaulkett]

%(!.#.$) did the trick nicely. Thanks!

 

[carlcaulkett]

It turned out that I didn't need to bother with Urxvt after all. The standard FreeBSD terminal handles all Unicode fonts if the locale is switched to UTF-8.

I now have what I think is a quite passable zsh prompt (without any zsh plugins, ralphbsz!)...

Note the constant reminder to my most frequently forgotten vim tip (most important when you're using a Mac keyboard!).