I have seen many people recommending urxvt. What is the advantage of it compared to gnome-terminal ? The last time I tried it, it's default font size was too small and I didn't like the font. Does it take some fiddling (configuration etc) with urxvt to bring it a minimal usable state ?
> Does it take some fiddling (configuration etc) with urxvt to bring it a minimal usable state
Yes. urxvt is pretty minimal and will likely be rather ugly by default. However, you can customize pretty much everything via editing your Xresources file.
In terms of advantages over gnome-terminal... it's lighter weight and considerably faster (though tbh, speed isn't that important for most people). It doesn't depend on any Gnome services/libraries, so it integrates better with e.g. a tiling WM. It's stable, in the sense of the developers won't cut <insert feature> out. The configuration is very flexible and it's extensible.
However, to be honest it's not for everybody. I wouldn't even say it's for "power users", it's really mostly for minimalists and the default configuration is incredibly sparse. If you're dissatisfied with gnome-terminal, I'd probably recommend roxterm or lxterminal instead. IMO, urxvt is more one of those "I already know I want it and I know why I want it" kind of things. That said, I've been using it for a few years and I really like it.
So far, gnome-terminal is the only one* I've seen that can rewrap text properly when the window width changes. Does urxvt do that? Is there something lighter (than gnome-terminal) that does?
* not the only one, but I'm not sure finalterm is really ready to use yet, and it's certainly not lightweight.
I would describe it as the simplest fastest least buggy terminal available that supports tabs and unicode. So I have tabs for each machine and tmux sessions on each of those machines, kind of 2-dimensional. As you'd guess for something with a full name of "unicode-rxvt" the unicode support is bulletproof, perhaps the best out there of all possible terminals although it varies over time.
As simple as possible, and no simpler.
It does nothing that impresses other terminal authors. Other terminal authors seem to prioritize user experience beneath keeping up with the achievements of other terminal authors. So it is completely incapable of 3-d widget animations, or transparent viewing of 3-d accelerated VDPAU movie rendering via transparency, or any number of things that are extremely technically challenging and "desktoppy" and very impressive to other terminal authors but users primarily see as something that makes it slow and crash alot and complicated and distracting.
I think it does. It starts off about as basic like xterm (i.e. using "fixed" as the font), so it's really low on resources. It is missing a bunch of features out of the box (Ctrl+Shift+V to paste, quick adjustment of font size at runtime, URL clicking, drag-and-drop, tabs, ...), but it has support for plugins (written in Perl), which is its other major advantage (all of the missing features I've mentioned have been implemented as plugins).
To quickly try it with a larger font size, you can do urxvt -fn 'xft:Dejavu Sans Mono:size=10' (but it's usually configured through X resources, see the urxvt man page)
