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Specs
Pros
Pro Incredibly fast
rxvt-unicode uses very little memory and takes a lightweight approach without losing many important functionalities. A single instance of urxvt takes about 6.5MB-8MB of RAM.
Pro Fast text rendering
rxvt-unicode has very fast text rendering, being able to render hundreds of MB of text in a very short time.
Pro Built-in Perl interpreter
It has a built-in Perl interpreter, meaning that no install is needed. Simply run urxvtperl.
Pro Supports multiple font types
Multiple font types can be displayed flawlessly in rxvt-unicode.
Cons
Con Unicode rendering is buggy
There are a few references to urxvt's buggy rendering, such as unicode combining characters, which bled through during scrolling.
Con Unicode characters that are too wide are blanked instead of clipped
If a character in a backup font is wider than the base font, urxvt substitutes the non-displayable character. A large letter space will show the wide characters, but the result is not reasonably spaced. There is a patch from 2014 that the urxvt maintainer will not merge.
Con Requires work to look acceptable
Out of the box, rxvt-unicode is not too pleasant to look at. Some understanding of Xresources is required for updating its appearance. That being said, the experience of customizing it can be very rewarding.
Recommendations
Comments
Flagged Pros + Cons
Pro Low memory usage
Rxvt-unicode uses very little memory and takes a lightweight approach without losing many important functionalities. A single instance of urxvt takes about 6.5MB-8MB of RAM.
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