Urxvt

Urxvt, also known as rxvt-unicode, is a highly customizable terminal emulator.

Configuring urxvt

In nixpkgs, urxvt is provided by the package rxvt-unicode. It can be configured to include your choice of plugins, reducing its closure size from the default configuration which includes all available plugins. To make use of this functionality, use an overlay or directly install an expression that overrides its configuration, such as:

rxvt-unicode.override {
  configure = { availablePlugins, ... }: {
    plugins = with availablePlugins; [ perls resize-font vtwheel ];
  };
}

If the configure function returns an attrset without the plugins attribute, availablePlugins will be used automatically.

In order to add plugins but also keep all default plugins installed, it is possible to use the following method:

rxvt-unicode.override {
  configure = { availablePlugins, ... }: {
    plugins = (builtins.attrValues availablePlugins) ++ [ custom-plugin ];
  };
}

To get a list of all the plugins available, open the Nix REPL and run

$ nix repl
:l <nixpkgs>
map (p: p.name) pkgs.rxvt-unicode.plugins

Alternatively, if your shell is bash or zsh and have completion enabled, type nixpkgs.rxvt-unicode.plugins.<tab>.

In addition to plugins the options extraDeps and perlDeps can be used to install extra packages. extraDeps can be used, for example, to provide xsel (a clipboard manager) to the clipboard plugin, without installing it globally:

rxvt-unicode.override {
  configure = { availablePlugins, ... }: {
    pluginsDeps = [ xsel ];
  };
}

perlDeps is a handy way to provide Perl packages to your custom plugins (in $HOME/.urxvt/ext). For example, if you need AnyEvent you can do:

rxvt-unicode.override {
  configure = { availablePlugins, ... }: {
    perlDeps = with perlPackages; [ AnyEvent ];
  };
}

Packaging urxvt plugins

Urxvt plugins resides in pkgs/applications/misc/rxvt-unicode-plugins. To add a new plugin, create an expression in a subdirectory and add the package to the set in pkgs/applications/misc/rxvt-unicode-plugins/default.nix.

A plugin can be any kind of derivation, the only requirement is that it should always install perl scripts in $out/lib/urxvt/perl. Look for existing plugins for examples.

If the plugin is itself a Perl package that needs to be imported from other plugins or scripts, add the following passthrough:

{
  passthru.perlPackages = [ "self" ];
}

This will make the urxvt wrapper pick up the dependency and set up the Perl path accordingly.