urxvt with powerline fonts [Solved]

[irenicus09]

Alright, so this is what I have for urxvt config on .Xdefaults file

https://github.com/irenicus/dotfiles/blob/master/Xdefaults

My issue is that when using zsh or when I have vim (especially with Airline plugin), some of the powerline aspects do not get rendered properly.

I've looked around, there's an overlay dedicated to using powerline fonts, etc but I'm wondering if there is a Gentoo way of getting it to work other than relying on a third party to do that.

I've also installed powerline-symbols and appended it to the font part but it doesn't seem to make any difference.

Feel free to enlighten me and I should also mention that I'm sort of new to urxvt as well.


Thanks for your time.

[nictki]

I'm on xmonad and "heavy" urxvt/vim/airline user.
Powerline fonts form https://github.com/powerline/fonts.
I put them in ~/.fonts and that's all, everything is there....

cut from my .Xresources

[irenicus09]

Thanks a lot man, I gave it a shot. I manually extracted all fonts to ~/.fonts directory.

But problem now is that the fonts appear too wide and I'm not sure whether it is due to not being set correctly or because of some other issue. I used the exact font config you listed, I also tried setting other fonts and they seem to have the same problem. Ofcourse I also manually used 'fc-cache -fv' after copying the fonts. Also I should mention that the urxvt is running as daemon and can that be a factor?

Here's what it looks like with new fonts:

https://i.imgur.com/seSpbEw.png

I've messed around with letterSpace setting with a greater negative value but it just doesn't feel right.

Compared to a font like this which I feel like gets rendered properly

https://i.imgur.com/npLInyS.png

Hmm not sure how to fix my issue.

EDIT:

I think I've figured out the root of my problem. When I run urxvt, not urxvtc which connects to the already running daemon (urxvtd) the fonts render fine. Not sure why that is the case but if I can take a wild guess it's probably because the new fonts are available only to the local user as they are in ~/.fonts directory but uxvtd runs as a daemon and since those fonts aren't available systemwide they don't get rendered.

If you have any other theory feel free to let me know, but I guess I've fixed my problems now.

Thanks for the help

[The Main Man]

I tried many solutions to get this to work but I just can't for some reason, wonder if it's even possible...
Gentoo Wiki, overlays, gazillion of different fonts and configs, nothing.
Best results with only partial glyphs I get with :

[The Main Man]

[irenicus09]

Hmm same here, some Powerline fonts just doesn't work for some reason.

But to get majority of them to work, basically what I had to do was move this line 'urxvtd -q -o -f' from .xinitrc to config file in my window manager (i3) 'exec --no-startup-id urxvtd -q -o -f', that made the urxvt run with $HOME path of the local user instead of root so had access to the local font directory and probably the reason why some fonts started working.

But still a lot of fonts don't work and I'm not sure why that is the case, non ttf fonts have issues for the most part.

Any other ideas?

Thanks.

[The Main Man]

Yay ! Finally got it to work

Had to make ebuild myself, basically this person made a fantastic patch :
https://github.com/blueyed/rxvt-unicode/blob/wcwidth-hack/README.md

He also made the AUR package, which I used to convert it to gentoo.

Anyway that's it, took me all day lol

@irenicus09, if you have problems with it let me know and I can upload ebuild on github.

[irenicus09]

@kajzer: It would be great if you could upload the ebuild, that is after you're done with that phone call in your avatar

I'm not familiar enough about the process involved in getting gentoo ebuilds to work or the gentoo way of installing the patched version of urxvt.

Feel free to let me know,

Thanks.

[The Main Man]

Hehe, okay here you go :
https://github.com/kajzersoze/rxvt-unicode

First i was doing it with a different name, but then perl extensions (urxvt-perls) are "confused" if there is no rxvt-unicode installed but rxvt-unicode-wcwidthcallback is installed instead.
So, the new package is rxvt-unicode-9.22-r4 (rxvt-unicode-9.22-r1 is latest in the tree)
You'll need

[irenicus09]

@kajzer: Get off that phone man..help me figure out how to install your ebuild on gentoo lol...haven't done it before

[The Main Man]

lol, you're right.
I should put that info there, forgot about that.

See this link :
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Custom_repository

or, if that's confusing you can do it like this :
make a new file in /etc/portage/repos.conf/ and name it rxvt-unicode.conf, inside of that file put this :

[irenicus09]

Thanks, installation worked fine.

But now I'm having a different problem.

The colors in vim or neovim, both seem to be gone

Is that a bug? How to debug the issue?

I think it would be nice if the issues can be fixed upstream, I can wait for that

[The Main Man]

Hmm, I didn't have that problem, I use vim and the colors didn't change.
I don't use neovim though.
Can't think of why would that happen in your case.

btw some USE flags were dropped from 9.21 to 9.22 , I didn't notice any difference but check that too.
You can try with rxvt-unicode-9.22-r1, that's the latest ebuild from the portage, I based 9.22-r4 on that ebuild, they are basically the same minus the patches.
If you have same problems with 9.22-r1 then it's something not related to this 9.22-r4 ebuild and font issue.

[irenicus09]

Alright, I don't know how the bug showed up but its gone now after disabling termguicolors in nvim config.

Anyway this is another error that I get,

[The Main Man]

Edit that file /var/lib/portage-overlays/rxvt-unicode/metadata/layout.conf and put there :
masters = gentoo

[irenicus09]

Hmm that's what I ended up doing eventually, thanks for your help. I hope your patch eventually makes it upstream cos it seems to be useful although I haven't tested much fonts at the moment..but it seems to work.

Also, everytime I look at your avatar I dunno why I can't control my laughter

[The Main Man]

Had a chat with author of that patch and that method is now deprecated, new one is in use and it works better in my case.

Anyway, for anyone that cares I've updated the ebuild to drop old method and use new one, the only change from previous usage is that new USE flag (wide-glyphs) is in use and it needs to be enabled for this to work.

Ebuild is based on this :
https://github.com/blueyed/PKGBUILD-rxvt-unicode-wide

[irenicus09]

Hmm not sure about the patch, but I didn't notice much of a difference actually so I've reverted back to using the gentoo urxvt package...is it possible for you to take a screenshot before and after the patch to highlight the problem?

Another thing that I'd like to mention is that some fonts seem to render better on urxvt after I've disabled antialias for that particular font, not sure why that's the case...what do you think?

Thanks for your time.

[The Main Man]

I'm lazy to revert back to gentoo package just to take a screenshot how it looks, but basically you wouldn't see any of the glyphs, instead there's white square, looks like crap

But here's with the patch :
http://imgur.com/a/jaiVu

here's my .Xresources, maybe there's something interesting for you :

[Vaernil]

I had to register just to say thanks, as I had been troubleshooting this for the past few hours and finally stumbled upon https://github.com/blueyed/rxvt-unicode/pull/1 and consequently your posts.
Here's a comparison (don't mind the missing glyph in the panel area ) if anyone wants to check it out.

Thanks a bunch again, you saved what's left of my sanity!

BTW. your manifest file needs fixing

[The Main Man]

Glad it helped.
You're lucky, I was troubleshooting this issue for days/weeks

I didn't really want to make this as an overlay or something, it was just temporary repository to help one user here, that's why I missed to update manifest, but I'm tracking situation regarding this and since I'm using it I will maintain it.

Thanks for the feedback and PR

[spsarolkar]

Thanks for the ebuild, I finally could get some decent rendering for urxvt

Anyone who is interested in comparison, here it goes

https://imgur.com/3VKv6Tx

Use flags:

x11-terms/rxvt-unicode 256-color blink fading-colors font-styles iso14755 mousewheel perl pixbuf unicode3 wide-glyphs

[yuri69]

@kajzer is there any chance this gets picked by Gentoo or urxvt upstream? Is there a way to help ya?

[The Main Man]

Upstream hardly, their mindset is from another era LOL

Gentoo... I don't know, it's possible to have this patch as a USE flag at least.
You can maybe try making a PR on gentoo github, or something, dunno....

[Juippisi]