So I’ve been reading about the greatness of mrxvt from these forums and I decided to give it a whirl.
I’m impressed by the number of features the terminal has to offer, but one thing keeps annoying me.
When I start mrxvt in the X-session, and leave it open when issuing a X quit -command (wether it’s ctrl-alt-backspace or fvwm Quit), mrxvt leaves the shell alive. If I write exit inside the terminal before quitting, it closes properly (maybe because the exit command goes to the shell). Xterm doesn’t have this problem.
Does anyone else have this same issue, and if so, how did you go around it?
Currently I just basically killall -9 all shells on ExitFunction, which also includes the one I startx from. So… not a very elegant solution.
The most elegant and the easiest solution would be to post this same issue on the mrxvt mailing lists (in case such lists exists) or to get in touch with the author. If you can reproduce it always, and the owner of mrxvt is capable of reproducing it too, and it is confirmed that it is an mrxvt bug, then, this kind of bug should be easy to fix.
The only effective workaround I can suggest in the while, is to use urxvt with screen.
– Jesús Guerrero
Why would I need screen?
Mrxvt has tabs, urxvt hasn’t. You can emulate the tabs functionality with screen, if you want (though that is the less important of all the features that Screen can offer. If you want to try and need some help configuring screen, you can ask here, or download my Versatile-NG config from jesgue.homelinux.org, which includes my screenrc file.
The screen man page is also very good.
– Jesús Guerrero
That’s bogus:
urxvt -pe tabbed– Thomas Adam
Well, that is a perl extension, and it was, indeed, a bogus extension the last time I tried the last or first line of the terminal was not properly counted, so, the line holding the cursors was outside of the term and was not visible because of that.
I don’t know if that bug still exists or not. If it was fixed, you can use that extension. Though, as I said, that is the lesser of the advantages of GNU Screen. Thanks anyway for reminding about that extension. I forgot about it.
– Jesús Guerrero
I appreciate the gesture, but I’ve been using screen for a long while and know it by heart. My question was more in a way of me not understanding what it had to do with the OP (which you just sorted out).
I’m not going to start any bug-reporting mayhem nor mailinglist mayhem for it, since the most obvious first question for them to ask me is to make sure I’m running the latest version (which I’m not going to do). So…
Overall solution: ditch mrxvt 
The problem with urxvt -pe tabbed seems to be still alive, at least in the changelog is not reported as fixed. And in the TODO section you can still read:
I don’t know, though, if the problem appears always or just under certain conditions. But I know from first hand how annoying can it get.
– Jesús Guerrero