The easiest customization is basic colors. It's customary to place your preferences in a file called ~/.Xdefaults and then to merge those preferences into the xrdb database. The xrdb subsystem is the X server resource database utility, which manages user preferences for X11 applications. One of the beauties of rxvt is its plain-text configuration file containing xrdb properties. You might be used to adjusting your interfaces using a Preferences panel on GNOME Terminal or Konsole, but for rxvt, you make changes in a text file. The default rxvt interface is (deceptively) simple and rather plain. On others, such as Slackware, rxvt may already be included. On Debian and Ubuntu: $ sudo apt install rxvt-unicode On Fedora, CentOS, or RHEL: $ sudo dnf install rxvt-unicode It's a small application and doesn't require much to build from source code, but most Linux distributions provide it, so it can be installed with your package manager. The fork of rxvt I recommend is usually called rxvt-unicode in software repositories, and it may provide a launcher called URxvt or similar. You learn to use low-spec terminals because your idea of what a terminal needs and what's only nice to have has shifted toward simplicity. Once you've learned to use rxvt effectively, you might find that Eshell and xterm and even the humble TTY interface serve their purpose. Of course, this isn't at all by intention it's arguably a shortcoming of rxvt and similar simple terminal emulators that they don't accept drag-and-drop actions or provide fancy contextual menus (more on that later), but it can be a surprising benefit.įurthermore, learning a simple terminal interface forces you to expand what you think of as a usable interface. Sometimes, maintaining a distinct separation between the local environment and remote systems is useful. Users new to working on remote systems can get confused about what the terminal represents, especially when it's so nicely integrated into the rest of their computers. It's distinctĪ simple terminal helps separate desktop functions (like drag-and-drop, which rxvt does not provide) from terminal functions (things you can do, for instance, over SSH). The rxvt terminal is relatively tiny a little heftier than xterm but a lot less demanding than GNOME Terminal and Konsole. These applications, the desktop itself included, barely touch precious system resources that are typically limited on aging computers. (My personal laptop was an "upcycled" 2004 iBook running Debian Linux until its screen became irreparable in 2017.) One of the distinct advantages of open source is that you can run all the latest requisite software, with all the latest security patches, using lightweight applications. One of my personal budgeting tricks (and contributions to the environmentally friendly idea of repair and reuse) is to never buy new hardware, rather to "rescue" a perfectly usable computer for my personal laptop. Free online course: RHEL Technical Overview.
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