A plug for Dillo

I like dillo. I've used it before. Even just to find the sites that assume you'll be using css and provide no alternative
It is mighty quick though. I might give it a try for file browsing as you suggest.

Of course a properly written site ought to be perfectly usable without css, if less pretty.

Will do, thanks
(I keep meaning to set up that urxvt daemon thing.)

edit:
I've just tried running 'urxvtd -o -f' followed by urxvtc and, to be honest, didn't really notice any difference in the time taken to open a urxvt window compared with a direct call to urxvt - a bit under a second in both cases. Sure, it's plenty fast enough for me either way, and hard to measure at all accurately. I think the main advantage of running the urxvtd daemon is supposed to be that when you open lots of terminal windows the memory use doesn't pile up.

Anyway - note that the time to open a dillo window, loading my bookmarks page, on this same box is about the same, just under a second!

Last edited by johnraff (2010-05-26 02:22:30)

OK my figures (launched from a urxvt window):
time urxvtc -e cal
real    0m0.504s
user    0m0.000s
sys    0m0.000s

time urxvt -e cal
real    0m0.930s
user    0m0.060s
sys    0m0.020s

so the daemon is faster, but the difference isn't as great as what you get, for some reason. The subjective time for the window to appear is really almost the same, and at the end of the day that's what matters perhaps? Dillo, likewise, seems to come up in about the same time, less than a second anyway. (with about 300MB of free RAM, 2.8GHz cpu)

Ah, try this:
urxvt & dillo
for me the dillo window opens first, with the urxvt on top of it
On the other hand,
urxvtc & dillo
urxvtc opens first, then dillo covers it.

Whatever it is, the end result is Dillo is fast! Right?

Mine is from the Jaunty repos. (Why did you compile yours?) Yes it is interesting that your urxvtc is so much faster to start up. Maybe I've got a slow hard disk?

Hmm mine's only 80G.

my urxvt version:

edit: added version number!
Version: 9.06-1
Package: rxvt-unicode
Installed-Size: 2932
Maintainer: Ubuntu MOTU Developers <ubuntu-motu@lists.ubuntu.com>
This package contains the program version with most commonly-used features
enabled, including transparency, (16-bit) Unicode and FreeType font support.

Last edited by johnraff (2010-06-02 03:29:43)

...er, sorry, I left that out of the text I grabbed... Now added.

btw I tried that urxvt vs urxvtc test on a much slower (266MHz, 192MB) box running Statler and got much the same results. The daemon version was slightly faster: real time 1.1s vs 1.5s. But the BIG difference was memory use. Checking with htop, every new instance of urxvt took some 6% of my precious ram, while using urxvtc didn't start a new process at all, and the urxvtd daemon took just a tiny bit more than it was using already. If you plan to have a number of terminals open at once, obviously the daemon is the way to go.
The only snag is if urxvd dies it will take all those terminals, and their processes, with it.

( btw Dillo is pretty cool )

rxvt is a terminal. sudo apt-get install rxvt-unicode

Agreed, the name is confusing. The package is called rxvt-unicode but the command you call it with is urxvt.
It's a nice quick terminal that displays strange characters like Japanese OK and does all kinds of things that uber-geeks know how to do using ~/.Xdefaults. I ignore all that except for setting the font and background colours, but it is a lot faster than terminator. Open a long man page and scroll to and fro to see the difference, unless you have a turbocharged CPU. You don't get tabs or split windows but I rarely use that stuff anyway.

urxvt also comes with a daemon called urxvtd which you can start up from your autostart.sh with a line 'urxvtd -q -o -f &'. Then if you open the client called urxvtc, instead of urxvt, it comes up a bit faster and uses a lot less memory, especially if you open several of them. This makes quite a difference for RAM-starved older machines.

btw anonymous, rxvt is a different package in it's own right that rxvt-unicode was developed from. Going further back in time there's also xvt! xvt is very light and fast if you're using a very old box and don't mind its (many) missing features.

I use rxvt-unicode - it seems to be much more popular than rxvt, but my original reason was that I needed the unicode support to display Japanese. (The newer but heavier terminals all do that of course.)

urxvt does let you scroll with the wheel. You can adjust the scrollbar appearance. Just to get you started, here are my settings in .Xdefaults (some people use .Xresources) but a google on '.Xdefaults urxvt' should bring up lots of stuff.

URxvt.font: -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-*-*
!URxvt*font: xft:DejaVuSansMono:pixelsize=13
URxvt*scrollstyle: plain
URxvt*scrollBar: true
URxvt*scrollBar_right: true
URxvt*iconFile: /usr/share/pixmaps/gnome-color-xterm.png
URxvt*background: #000020
URxvt*foreground: #ffffff
!URxvt*cursorColor: magenta

(Commented-out lines start with a ! )

Sector11, you've just hit a kiloposts - congratulations!
Re trimming RAM, there are lots of things you can do, but although Dillo could be a candidate to help here, maybe this would be a good topic for a new thread?