Rendering of unicode symbols in urxvt (height / width) vs. gnome-terminal

Question

gnome-terminal renders the unicode symbols (arrows) in my prompt different from urxvt:

They are displayed across the whole line's height, have less spacing in-between, but more appropriate spacing at the end (there is a space char after them).

Edit: the missing space at the end was triggered by having an escape code, e.g. %b for non-bold in zsh, at the end of RPS1. Removing it or adding a space after it fixed this particular issue.

My urxvt font config:

URxvt.font: xft:Ubuntu Mono:pixelsize=16, \
    xft:monospace, \
    xft:Ubuntu Mono for Powerline

This applies also to other symbols like ↳.

I have noticed that lilyterm behaves like gnome-terminal (caused by vte), while konsole, xterm etc behave like urxvt.

Is it possible to configure urxvt to do the same?

I am using rxvt-unicode-256color 9.19-1 on Ubuntu 14.04. gnome-terminal is more recent (from Debian testing), and lilyterm is built from source.

An example prompt with symbols:

↳ git:m@o[+2]¹✗ ❯❯

Answer 1

The different heights are expected, just like the issue that too wide symbols are replaced with a square symbol..

I've asked about this on the rxvt-unicode mailing list a while ago (Q4 2004), and created a patch, but it was rejected: http://lists.schmorp.de/pipermail/rxvt-unicode/2014q4/002042.html

The patch/branch is available at https://github.com/exg/rxvt-unicode/compare/master...blueyed:display-wide-glyphs. It will make rxvt-unicode not replace too wide symbols with a square icon, but just display them - without special handling. Therefore you will have to add a space after it to display it completely (otherwise it gets cropped).

I've asked to include it into Arch's rxvt-unicode-patched: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rxvt-unicode-patched/