How to Create Transparency and Clickable Links in URXVT Terminal

When ever I use Linux as a desktop I lie to be able to use the terminal I like which is URXVT. It is a port of the old rxvt with unicode support for all languages. One thing that I love about it is the ability to make links which when clicked will open up a defined browser. Most of the newer terminals like Gnome Terminal and Konsole in KDE have this ability but I do not care for either of those to much. Below I will show the few short steps to making a very nice looking URXVT terminal.

First thing to do is install urxvt of course. Since I am on Ubuntu 10.04 I will use apt-get to get it:

apt-get install rxvt-unicode

The name of the package may be slightly different on other distributions

Next thing to do is open our .Xdefaults file in our home directory

vi .Xdefaults

Note: If you do not have this file you can just create it.

Here is the contents of my file:

r00t@666:~$ cat .Xdefaults
urxvt*loginShell:true
urxvt*inheritPixmap: true
urxvt*tintColor: white
urxvt*transparent:true
urxvt*shading:40
urxvt*background:Black
urxvt*foreground:White
urxvt*scrollBar:true
urxvt*scrollBar_right:true
urxvt*transpscrollbar:true
urxvt*saveLines:50000
URxvt*font: xft:terminus:pixelsize=14
URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,matcher
URxvt.urlLauncher: google-chrome
URxvt.matcher.button: 2
URxvt.matcher.pattern.1: \\bwww\\.[\\w-]\\.[\\w./?&@#-]*[\\w/-]
r00t@666:~$

If you want to customize this to meet you needs just replace some of my values with your own. For example if you didn’t like the font just replace terminus with whichever font you prefer.
If you wanted to use Firefox as the default web browser then replace google-chrome.
You can also play with the colors and shading and some of the other options. I am using a tiling window manager so I have no need to set the shape but you can do that as well by adding a section like this:

URxvt*geometry: 84×24

Here is a screenshot of my terminal using irssi after I added all these options:

There are lots of other options for URXVT, this was just meant to get you started. If any one has any questions, post em here and I will do my best to answer them.