The Mac OS X Terminal Holy Grail: mrxvt

I’ve been a bit unhappy with terminal offerings on OS X since I switched. I’ve spent a bit of time working with each iTerm, GLTerm, xterm, aterm, eterm, but always end up back with Terminal.app because it’s fast and pretty. My wish list has always been speed and anti-aliased fonts. I use Gnu screen for tabs and don’t mind using X11 coming from a Unix background. Recently I added 256-color support to my wish list which Terminal.app and xterm don’t support (neither X11.app’s version or the MacPorts version have it compiled in).

I finally stumbled across mrxvt. It supports anti-aliased fonts, 256-colors and it’s unbelievably fast! Eyeball the screenshot below–a 256-color terminal is so worth the effort–this is mrxvt running Gnu Screen running Vim.

Vim running in Gnu Screen running inside mrxvt

Although I had to compile it myself, I had no issues with the following: ./configure --enable-everything --disable-debug --disable-greek. (Install the no_debug_x patch if you’re compiling mrxvt-0.5.2 or it’ll be very slow.)

I also added the following to my .Xresources:

! --- mrxvt settings
mrxvt*background: black
mrxvt*foreground: white
mrxvt*scrollBar: false
mrxvt*loginShell: true
mrxvt*autohideTabbar: true
mrxvt*syncTabTitle: true
mrxvt*hideButtons: true
mrxvt*cursorBlink: true
mrxvt*font: Monaco
mrxvt*faceSize: 11
mrxvt*cursorColor: red
mrxvt*xft:True
mrxvt*xftFont: Monaco
mrxvt*xftSize:12
mrxvt*xftAntialias:True
mrxvt*termName: xterm-256color
! blue is usually too dark to see. this fixes that
mrxvt*color4: RoyalBlue
mrxvt*color12: RoyalBlue

The Gnu Screen from MacPorts is already compiled with 256-color support so putting the following in my .screenrc was the last step:

###############
# 256 colours #
###############
#
#.. __: http://frexx.de/xterm-256-notes/
#

# terminfo and termcap for nice 256 color terminal
# allow bold colors - necessary for some reason
attrcolor b ".I"
# tell screen how to set colors. AB=background, AF=foreground
termcapinfo xterm 'Co#256:AB=\E[48;5;%dm:AF=\E[38;5;%dm'
# erase background with current bg color
defbce "on"