Re: Do we still have an rxvt maintainer?

[Thomas Wolff <mined at towo dot net>]

Christopher Faylor wrote:
> ... I don't know if there are any other issues that need
> to be addressed with rxvt ...
There are a few issues that I had already pointed out to Steve O 
recently:

* A new port should be based on the newer rxvt-unicode project.
  Actually, I have been able to compile the newest rxvt-unicode 
  on cygwin, but unfortunately, it does not work in Unicode mode.
  I guess the reason is that it strongly (and dogmatically) depends on 
  the locale mechanism for character encoding support.
  So in order to enable rxvt with Unicode, some sort of locale 
  emulation functionality (like for the non-X mode, or maybe in 
  connection with it, see below) would probably have to be added.

* The stand-alone mode (without X windows) is a very strong 
  advantage of the current port of rxvt. It would probably have to 
  be adapted as Steve wrote to me:
> I don't know how much more of the X library has to be emulated due to 
> unicode, or how much bit-rot has occurred since I last looked at it.

* For the stand-alone (non-X) mode, it would be nice to have 
  "Windows look-and-feel" support.
  With this option, foreground and background colors should be taken 
  from registry entries 
  /HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Colors/WindowText and
  /HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Colors/Window, respectively.
  Unfortunately, for the font setting, this is not as straight-forward 
  as there is no such thing like a "default Windows monowidth font and 
  size" setting.

Considering the effort and problems to be expected, it might be 
worth considering to add the stand-alone features to xterm rather 
than to rxvt-unicode. This might turn out easier and rxvt might not be 
needed anymore then.

Kind regards,
Thomas Wolff