hacks · ideas · thoughts

I just found the almost-perfect tabbed terminal called mrxvt (previously called materm). It has tabs (with built-in widget so it doesn’t require gtk/qt crap), configurable keyboard shortcuts, and so much more. The only thing, well two things, that it sucks at is Unicode support and problem with XIM, which creates problem with xvnkb. Unicode? Well, that I can live without. In fact I can’t recall the last time I need to use Unicode in a terminal and in such case, urxvt & xterm are here.

Now, on to problem with XIM. I’ve submitted the bug to mrxvt developers but so far no help yet. Talked to xvnkb’s author, good friend he is but he was too busy to help. The problem was this: on versions 0.4.x it works just fine, but the pretty stuff comes with 0.5.x so I want that. On mrxvt v0.5.2, xvnkb’s just not working. I use xvnkb_ctrl to bind keyboard shortcuts but disable (-d) and enable (-e) just didn’t work.

Played with it for a while and found out, xvnkb GUI does work. Weird? But I don’t want to use that ugly and unfriendly GUI, I want my shortcuts! Keep playing and found that the GUI was only toggling while what I did with my shortcut was to disable and enable:

xvnkb_ctrl -d
xvnkb_ctrl -e

So I tried this to disable, enable it first and then toggle:

xvnkb_ctrl -e&&xvnkb_ctrl -t

Surprisingly, it worked like a charm. :) So that was the problem. No, that was how I fixed the problem. I still don’t know what the problem really is. And I don’t need to. Hey, I solved it.