Rxvt

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Terminal emulator for the X Window System

title: "Rxvt" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["x-window-programs", "free-terminal-emulators"] description: "Terminal emulator for the X Window System" topic_path: "general/x-window-programs" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rxvt" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Terminal emulator for the X Window System ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox software"]

Field	Value
name	rxvt
screenshot	rxvt.png
caption	Vanilla rxvt displaying the rxvt man page
author	Rob Nation
developer	rxvt project
latest_release_version	2.6.4
latest_release_date
latest_preview_version	2.7.10
latest_preview_date
genre	Terminal emulator
license	GPL-2.0-or-later
website
::

History

Rxvt was originally written by Rob Nation and later extensively modified by Mark Olesen, who took over maintenance for several years. It is intended to be a slimmed-down alternate for xterm, omitting some of its little-used features, like Tektronix 4014 emulation and toolkit-style configurability. The latter refers to the Xt resource mechanism, e.g., for binding keys. Rxvt is an extended version of the older xvt terminal emulator by John Bovey of the University of Kent.

The name originally stood for "Rob's xvt" (with XVT stands for 'X Virtual Terminal'), but was later re-dubbed "our xvt" (pronounced like the letters r-x-v-t).

Features

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Urxvt-vim-modemu-panda-bitstreamverasansmono.png" caption="rxvt-unicode with translucency and a truetype mono font"] ::

Aside from features such as those controlled by resource files, '''rxvt''''s terminal emulation differs from xterm in two important ways:

It emulates a VT102, rather than a VT220. That means that it handles 8-bit data differently, does not implement the C1 controls that xterm does. xterm does implement a switch "-k8"{{cite web |url=http://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html#xterm_175 |title=XTERM- Change Log - Patch #175 - 2003/3/9 - XFree86 4.3.0 |author=Thomas E. Dickey
The strings sent for function keys are different. xterm sends strings that are encoded using the same rules as the ANSI/ISO escape sequences. '''Rxvt''''s do not, though they provide comparable flexibility in this area.

Newer versions of rxvt have primitive support for pseudo-transparency.

The rxvt distribution also includes an analog clock program called rclock. Very old distributions included a copy of vttest, but dropped that in 1996 with version 2.18.

Forks

aterm (from rxvt 2.4.8) created for use with the AfterStep window manager (no longer maintained)
Eterm (from rxvt 2.21) created for use with Enlightenment
mrxvt (from rxvt 2.7.11) created for multiple tabs and additional features (latest version released in 2008-09-10)
urxvt (rxvt-unicode) (from rxvt 2.7.11)
Wterm, designed for NeXTSTEP style window managers such as Window Maker

References

"Welcome to RXVT".
"Linux Journal Interviews Robert Nation".
[https://linux.die.net/man/1/urxvt urxvt(1) - Linux man page]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20071111233249/http://www.penguin-soft.com:80/penguin/man/1/wterm.html Wterm(1) man]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20070330193642/http://wterm.org:80/ Wterm - The Lightweight Feature-Rich Terminal Emulator for X]

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::