My mrxvt modification

From the original mrxvt, I've kept and am currently working on what I believe to be important. Noticeably, support for scalable fonts (in particular Microsoft True Type fonts) which is provided by the Xft library and full support for UTF-8. Drawing UTF-8 encoded strings is not hard as it simply involves calling XftDrawStringUtf8. What is harder is to make sure that internally, strings are processed as potentially multi-byte per character strings at all times.

What is broken for now is

1) selection in mrxvt of utf-8 data, the glyphs just disappear once selected. Well actually only the first one seems to be copied and can only be pasted once in mrxvt
2) backspace doesn't work properly

For example in python I do:
print u"\u0540\u0539\u0538"
which prints out 3 characters:
ՀԹԸ
but when I select those 3 chars all that remains is:
Հ
and when I paste it in the terminal then it is not possible to delete the first character

I'll complete this post as I go along...

Memory size of X terminal emulators

Ideally I'd like to make do with the smallest applications which do exactly what I need and nothing more. In particular lets consider the memory footprint of terminal emulators i.e. xterm, mrxvt and my modified mrxvt.
I'll be using a non-debug build (no -g flag), "ls -ash" for the size of the executable and "ldd" to list the dependencies on shared libraries. I'll also be compiling them with Unicode support when possible.

xterm
316K xterm
needs 19 shared libraries
linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000)
libXft.so.2 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXft.so.2 (0x40019000)
libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x4002c000)
libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6 (0x4014c000)
libXrender.so.1 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXrender.so.1 (0x401bb000)
libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1 (0x401c3000)
libXaw.so.8 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXaw.so.8 (0x401f1000)
libXmu.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXmu.so.6 (0x4024d000)
libXext.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x40264000)
libXt.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.so.6 (0x40272000)
libSM.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libSM.so.6 (0x402c5000)
libICE.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libICE.so.6 (0x402cd000)
libncurses.so.5 => /lib/libncurses.so.5 (0x402e5000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0x4032a000)
libexpat.so.0 => /usr/lib/libexpat.so.0 (0x40444000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x40463000)
libXpm.so.4 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXpm.so.4 (0x40467000)
libXp.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXp.so.6 (0x40477000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)

mrxvt with most options enabled
428K mrxvt
needs 18 shared libraries
linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000)
libXft.so.2 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXft.so.2 (0x40019000)
libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x4002c000)
libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6 (0x4014c000)
libXrender.so.1 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXrender.so.1 (0x401bb000)
libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1 (0x401c3000)
libpng.so.3 => /usr/lib/libpng.so.3 (0x401f1000)
libjpeg.so.62 => /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.62 (0x4021f000)
libXpm.so.4 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXpm.so.4 (0x4023f000)
libICE.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libICE.so.6 (0x4024f000)
libSM.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libSM.so.6 (0x40267000)
libz.so.1 => /lib/libz.so.1 (0x4026f000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/libm.so.6 (0x40280000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0x402a3000)
libXext.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x403bd000)
libexpat.so.0 => /usr/lib/libexpat.so.0 (0x403cb000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x403ea000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)

My modified mrxvt
324K mrxvt
needs 15 shared libraries
linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000)
libXft.so.2 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXft.so.2 (0x40019000)
libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x4002c000)
libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6 (0x4014c000)
libXrender.so.1 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXrender.so.1 (0x401bb000)
libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1 (0x401c3000)
libICE.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libICE.so.6 (0x401f1000)
libSM.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libSM.so.6 (0x40209000)
libz.so.1 => /lib/libz.so.1 (0x40212000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/libm.so.6 (0x40223000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0x40246000)
libXext.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x4035f000)
libexpat.so.0 => /usr/lib/libexpat.so.0 (0x4036d000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x4038c000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)

By looking at my dependencies you may realise that I've removed a lot of visual features such as background png, jpeg support and transparency. I've also removed other stuff like some of the buttons that I deemed unnecessary.

Although the size of the executable plus the number of dependencies gives some idea at how much memory each application at runtime it's hard to put an exact figure as the programs don't run isolated.

Anyway my mission will be to once again make sure I only use the shared libraries I really need.