For years I had it in my head that urxvt was the best terminal emulator one
could find. I ignored all those little areas of Unix management where I’d have
to set my TERM variable to something like xterm-256color before some remote
shell would recognize my terminal correctly, or where F keys had to be
configured before they would be passed to the running application. Those little
moments when I’d load a new color scheme for mutt, or vim, and I could tell
that I wasn’t quite getting the same experience that everyone else who
installed the plug-in had. Its been a good number of years this way, and I’d
just gotten used to it.
It wasn’t until the other day, I found a new color scheme for vim called one
which, as part of the setup, required me to add set termguicolors to my
Neovim config. This worked fine on iTerm2 on the Mac, but did not work at all
with urxvt on Linux. The colors weren’t even close.
Ultimately this lead me to discover that “true color” is missing from urxvt.
No support, apparently. So now I’m trying out one called kitty, and
was able to my Xdefaults into the configuration for Kitty in just a few
minutes once I’d made the decision to switch.
Looking back, I think the only reason I ever started using URxvt was that someone I respected told me it was the best, which could have been true for the time. If I wasn’t so enthralled with finding the best color scheme for my eyes, I probably wouldn’t have cared enough. Another lesson perhaps in questioning the old dogma.
If you need a pick-me-up, find a better color scheme. And if you have to, switch terminal emulators. Like a new pair of socks after a long hike, it just feels fresh.