Strange what happens when you hit a key at the wrong time. I pressed the tab key by accident last night, and found this.
Where did that come from? I’ve been using rxvt-unicode off and on for years now, mostly because it can display antialiased fonts and pseudotransparency, but more recently because it can display Japanese text too. I never knew there was a tabbed version … or rather, I never bothered to look for one.
Serves me right. I’m guilty of running three or four terminals at a time and wringing my hands because I wished it would show tabs, and here all along (or at least sometime recently) tabs were a possibility. Once again, I’m late to the party.
Personally, I prefer Sakura still, just because I think Sakura is a little more considerate of graphical environments. urxvt-tabbed doesn’t seem to have any configurable points from the program itself. In other words, if you want to adjust pseudotransparency or set other options, you still have to do that from the .Xdefaults file. Sakura, on the other hand, has a nifty right-click menu that gives you the chance to change things while it’s running.
But this is very useful, and good to have on board. Arch has this in it by default; the Crux version will comply if you include gtk-perl when you build it. Ubuntu … I haven’t looked yet.
And that, again, was my original mistake. 😳
Motho ke motho ka botho 
I didn’t know urxvt had Gtk tabs, but I use the non-Gtk tabs. To do so, you need to add this to your .Xdefaults:
URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,tabbed
I think it looks a lot simpler and nicer. You can see an example of it in this screenshot.
When I need tabs I use Screen, as it also works outside X. I never knew there was a tabbed urxvt, but I don’t really need it 😛
I have to second the plug for Screen. Using it with Urxvt has been by far my favorite terminal arrangement for a long while. The main drawback is little to no mouse control, but in my mind at least, the other benefits make up for that. The Gentoo wiki page on Screen is the best resource I’ve seen to get started with it, even after the meltdown.
Huh. The gtk tabs look a lot prettier than the text tabs I have going on right now. Any idea how to get urxvt-tabbed in ubuntu?
Xew: That, sir, is an excellent question. Give me a day or two to look into it. …
Xew:
In Ubuntu, just look at the FAQ in /usr/share/doc/rxvt-unicode/
To start it from the command line, just add the option ‘-pe tabbed’.
If you want it by default, add the line:
Urxvt.perl-ext-common: default,tabbed
to your .Xdefaults file.
The former method apparently doesn’t work with pseudo-transparency for some reason, but I think there is likely a way to specify it with the latter method.
D’oh…
I just realized you were talking about gtk. Sorry, ignore me.
is there a way to close tabs using the urxvt perl extension? i can only manage to create new tabs and switch between them.
Um, you could log out of that terminal tab. That closes it. Otherwise I don’t see a ‘close’ button.
I know this is old but this is one of the first pages to come up when searching urxvt tabbed.
Xew: Getting GTK tabs is easy all you have to do is run ‘urxvt-tabbed’
fellas, ctrl+D will delete your tabs. 8^B
Another wonderful find for me (though as usual I’m extremely late to the party!). One thing I’d like to ask though, how did you get urxvt to look like that? What does your .Xdefaults file look like should really be my question! 🙂