Termite

Over the years I’ve used a lot of terminal emulators. I finally settled on rxvt-unicode (urxvt) and was happy with it for quite some time. However, configuration was a pain and after encountering several issues with font rendering I finally decided to look for something better.

As I primarily use a tiling window manager I wanted something that was designed for use without a mouse.

After trying several of the more commonly recommended terminal emulators I was finally recommended Termite.

Termite is a very minimal terminal emulator, primarily designed to be used with tiling window managers. It’s also modal like vim, having both an insert and a command mode in which keybindings have different functions, for instance ctrl-shift-x will enter a url hints mode similar to vimperator’s follow function in firefox, allowing you to open a url displayed in a terminal window without the need to use a mouse.

Installation was fairly simple as termite is currently available as termite-git in the Archlinux AUR: yaourt -S termite-git.

Configuration was also reasonably simple to do. Termite can read it’s configuration from various locations but for the sake of consistency I used ~/.config/termite/config . For configuration options see: man termite.config .

My initial configuration is as follows:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
[options]
resize_grip = false
scroll_on_output = false
scroll_on_keystroke = true
audible_bell = false
visible_bell = false
mouse_autohide = false
allow_bold = true
dynamic_title = true
urgent_on_bell = true
clickable_url = true
font = Inconsolata-dz for Powerline 8
scrollback_lines = 1000
search_wrap = true
cursor_blink = system
cursor_shape = block
browser = chromium

Now at this point I had a nice, functional terminal. However what would be the point without a little rice. In the past I’ve written color schemes by hand from a color palette. However I recently came across terminal.sexy which provides a very nice webgui for creating terminal color schemes and can export them in a variety of formats for different terminal emulators, including termite.

Here is my current color scheme:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
[colors]

# special
foreground      = #c0b18b
foreground_bold = #c0b18b
cursor          = #c0b18b
#background      = #1f1f1f
background = rgba(31 ,31, 31, 0.85)

# black
color0  = #4a3637
color8  = #4a3637

# red 
color1  = #d17b49
color9  = #d17b49

# green
color2  = #7b8748
color10 = #7b8748

# yellow
color3  = #af865a
color11 = #af865a

# blue
color4  = #535c5c
color12 = #535c5c

# magenta
color5  = #775759
color13 = #775759

# cyan
color6  = #6d715e
color14 = #6d715e

# white
color7  = #c0b18b
color15 = #c0b18b

And of course, what would be the point without a screenshot:

The latest versions of my configs are usually available from my dotfiles repository on github.