urxvt-font-size(1)

💖 urxvt-font-size(1) — RXVT-UNICODE 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because this little cutie lives in the urxvt-font-size(1) manual and honestly? it's a whole personality. it's a perl extension that lets you resize your terminal font on the fly, mid-sentence, while your code is compiling or whatever. iconic behavior, no notes. 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

font-size — the interactive font size setter. that's it, that's the girl. 💅

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🌸 USAGE 🌸

so here's how you get her set up: drop the font-size script into $HOME/.urxvt/ext/ 📁 and then add her to the list of enabled perl-extensions in ~/.Xresources:

URxvt.perl-ext-common: ...,font-size

and boom, she's alive. the extension automatically binds:

• Ctrl++ → the increase function 🔼
• Ctrl+- → the decrease function 🔽
• Ctrl+0 → the reset function 🧼

but like, if you wanna use the other available functions or remap the keys entirely (main character energy, go off 💅), just add some keybindings of your own:

URxvt.keysym.C-Up:     font-size:increase
URxvt.keysym.C-Down:   font-size:decrease
URxvt.keysym.C-S-Up:   font-size:incglobal
URxvt.keysym.C-S-Down: font-size:decglobal
URxvt.keysym.C-equal:  font-size:reset
URxvt.keysym.C-slash:  font-size:show

⚠️ heads up bestie: for urxvt versions older than 9.21, the resources have to look like this instead (yes, the perl: prefix matters, don't skip it 🙈):

URxvt.keysym.C-Up:     perl:font-size:increase
URxvt.keysym.C-Down:   perl:font-size:decrease
URxvt.keysym.C-S-Up:   perl:font-size:incglobal
URxvt.keysym.C-S-Down: perl:font-size:decglobal
URxvt.keysym.C-equal:  perl:font-size:reset
URxvt.keysym.C-slash:  perl:font-size:show

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🦋 Supported functions 🦋

here's the full roster, the whole squad, the lineup 💜:

• increase/decrease — increase or decrease the font size of the current terminal. just the current one, she's not nosy. ✨
• incglobal/decglobal — same as above and it also adjusts the X server values so all newly started terminals will use the same fontsize. sharing is caring fr fr 🫶
• incsave/decsave — same as incglobal/decglobal and it also modifies the ~/.Xresources file so the changed font sizes will persist over a restart of the X server or a reboot. permanent. committed. 🔥
• reset — reset the font size to the value of the resource that was set when you started the terminal. back to factory settings, we love a clean slate 🌈
• show — show the current value of the 'font' resource in a popup. peekaboo, here's your font 🍓

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🎀 changing the step size 🎀

you can also change the step size that the script uses to increase the font size:

URxvt.font-size.step: 4

the default step size is 1. so with this setting, a size change sequence would be like 8->12->16->20 instead of 8->9->10->11->12 etc. big jumps, no in-between. 💀

but PLEASE note, bestie 😭 — many X11 fonts are only available in specific sizes, and odd sizes are often not available. so in that case you end up with an effective step size of 2 instead of 1. math said nope. 🙈

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👑 sign-off 👑

love u, go resize something. this page is from version 9.31, dated 2026-08-20, and it's part of the RXVT-UNICODE manual, serving absolute looks as always. mwah 💋✨