Here’s the Deal

rxvt-unicode vs st

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When comparing rxvt-unicode vs st, the Slant community recommends rxvt-unicode for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” rxvt-unicode is ranked 1st while st is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose rxvt-unicode is:

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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Common Questions

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Pros

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.

Pro
Can be daemonized to reduce resource usage

For those who want to lower their system's resource usage, rxvt-unicode allows for daemonization. This way you can run several instances of urxvt inside a single process.

Pro
Supports terminal transparency

Changing the transparency of the terminal is allowed for in rxvt-unicode. This not only makes for eye candy but is also good for GUI usability.

Pro
Minimum dependencies and simple text config

Pro
Supports multiple font types

Multiple font types can be displayed flawlessly in rxvt-unicode.

Pro
Handles bold text colour properly

Displays characters with text attribute bold actually as bold glyphs.

Pro
High performance

Rxvt-unicode is much faster than most alternatives.

Pro
Unicode support

International language support is provided through Unicode.

Pro
Proper wrapping support

During selection and pasting wrapped text doesn't break into lines at place of wrapping.

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
Low memory usage

st is built to serve as a lightweight terminal emulator. It's very light and doesn't require many resources to run, making it able to run well on older and low-end machines.

Pro
Extremely simple architecture

st consists of a single C file that takes seconds to recompile. This also makes it very easy to understand and customize.

Pro
24-bit "True Color" support

st supports color escape sequences for a full 16 million 24-bit color spectrum, instead of the typical 256 colors.

Pro
Support for fontconfig

There is full XFT (X Free Type interface library) and fallback font support through fontconfig in st. If your selected font is missing a certain glyph or symbol, but one of your other installed fonts has it, it will be shown.

Pro
Copyfree licensing

Copyfree licensing implies that the user has the freedom to copy, use, modify, and distribute what he/she possesses.

Pro
Image previews

Handles image previews (e.g. in ranger) way better than other terminal emulators.

Pro
Patches are great

The patches on the site are great. Scroll back, hide the mouse, etc.

Pro
Minimalist

Hackable and lightweight.

Pro
Blazing fast

it is extremely responsive and fast, even on older computers.

Pro
Clean

The terminal doesn't have any bloated features nobody uses. It is very minimal and extendable.

Ad
Cons

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.

Con
Requires work to configure useful functionality (clickable URL's, font scaling, tabs)

Con
In daemon mode you can lose all your terminals

Because of sharing the same process terminal windows cannot be killed without sacrificing all other open windows. That becomes even more dangerous if you use multiple graphical managers without overriding socket with RXVT_SOCKET.

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
Bloated

Exists because Xterm is complete trash. Although it has a lot of features, you will most likely never use them all.

Con
No support yet for 24-bit "True Color"

Though this is still not available, you can download the patched version for 24bit, here.

Con
Font size cannot be changed on the fly with the mousewheel

Sometimes you may need to enlarge the font to improve readability, or shrink it to have more real estate and "hawk's eye" view of data. In rxvt you need to change the configuration file or use these commands:

$ function fontsize 
     {printf '\33]50;%s%d\007' "xft:Dejavu Sans Mono:size=$1::antialias=false"}
$ fontsize 22

Con
No option to have a "reverse color" cursor

While you can choose the color of the cursor and the character under the cursor, there's no automatic "reverse color" for the cursor. This makes it impossible to use rxvt-unicode if you have a light background terminal and a dark background editor.

Con
Configuration requires recompiling

Though recompilation takes seconds, knowledge of C header files is required for customization (though it's pretty easy to do for someone who knows how to edit config files).