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Comparison of my modified Rxvt versus Urxvt
from my point of view -- i don't use urxvt regularly, but I implemented many my original ideas in rxvt.
Drawbacks:
- rxvt has no support for utf8
- rxvt has no support for Xft. Xft uses double buffering, and consumes memory (& cpu).
Advantages:
- more anti-flickering measures:
background pixmap is None. Good when changing stacking order of windows
= popping up terminal window; basically avoids a light flash (flicker) on every change of input focus.
- accelerated scrolling
run "vmstat -1" and see the flicker in urxv with core fonts.
- hinted resizing, and atomic redrawing:
When the X window is resized, application can tell rxvt to keep the current image, while rendering into a
temporary buffer, then switching to the ready screen image.
.... This avoids flickering (on resizing).
- aggressive smooth-scrolling
when the application makes the atomic redraw, explained in the previous point, rxvt uses heckel algorithm to detect
scrolling, and scrolls in a series of microsteps. This may let you keep read while scrolling.
This is working (perfect for reading web pages in elinks), but there are still problems to solve.
- some handy commands (escape sequences):
- set X selection ... (transparent to ssh, compare with using Xsel, which needs connection to the X server)