Urxvt is a common terminal emulator that works fine until you want to use unicode. Although the emulator can handle unicode, the rendering is a known problem. St on the other hand handles unicode perfectly.
The Suckless philosophy is admirable. It aims at developing light software that the user themselves customize to their needs. The code is minimalistic and the configs are embedded in the installation.
Download st from Suckless and extract it into $HOME/st. In the README it says how to install it. The installation requires Xlib header files, in Debian based distributions you need,
sudo apt-get install libxft-dev
If there is something else missing, you can potentially find that with, e.g.,
sudo apt-get install apt-file
sudo apt-file update
apt-file search X11/Xlib.h
sudo apt install libx11-dev
Now for the installation. Extract the tar.gz file, and then apply the patches that you want (which can be downloaded from st’s page), and then install.
tar xf st-0.8.2.tar.gz
cd st-0.8.2
patch -Np1 -i ~/st/patches/st-alpha-0.8.2.diff
patch -Np1 -i ~/st/patches/st-clipboard-0.8.2.diff
patch -Np1 -i ~/st/patches/st-scrollback-0.8.2.diff
sudo make clean install
st
Note that you need a compositor running (Compton is popular) in order for transparency to work.
I have chosen not to install a theme, which you can do with, e.g.,
patch -Np1 -i ~/st/patches/st-solarized-both-20190128-3be4cf1.diff
Instead I changed the colors in the config.h file and resinstalled.
For unicode characters in st you want to install a “powerline patched font”, this is , e.g., necessary if you want your font to be compatilbe with Vim Airline which uses PowerlineSymbols unicode. Nerds fonts have several alternatives for fonts. I use the font called Hack, and it can be installed with,
sudo apt-get install fonts-hack-ttf
Then you can add the following to your config.h file:
static char *font = "Hack:pixelsize=14:antialias=true:autohint=true";
If you have patched and you get a compilation error you might need to delete the config.h file and then recompile.