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)