The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

Yes, I'm probably weird.

The editor may be interested to know there is another terminal emulator with Tektronix functionality: NCSA Telnet. Yes, I mean the MSDOS (and MacOS) application with it's own TCP stack found here:

http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/PCTelnet/

My roommate in college had a diskless PC/XT and used NCSA Telnet to work on Unix hosts. He even browsed the web, using the Tektronix terminal for porn^Wgraphics. Pretty amazing piece of software.

The native xterm and Putty (on Windows) are the two best that I've found.

As for most other "grumpy" features, I use screen. This is better than "tabbed" sessions for me (takes up no screen real-estate), gives me a searchable backscroll buffer, keyboard driven cut-n-paste, offers the multi-user option if I want someone to be able to connect and work with me or just watch what I'm showing them (read-only mode if I like), and lets me yank my text sessions over to another connection (detach and re-attach).

screen even preserves my vital text/curses applications through the occasional windowing system crash (assuming that the rest of the system is still accessible).

So I think I'll stick with my "screen session in an real xterm" approach for the foreseeable future!

JimD

Having to go through a GUI (or edit a set of config files that are *truly* opaque because they represent a GUI's persistence) in order to configure my terminal is too much. I understand that this is easier for the new user and that it's more intuitive, but if you want to copy your config places, it's painful. If you want to know what's going on, it's painful. (In other words, the needs of the geek are different from the needs of the newbie, and it's a *rare* program that even comes close to addressing both.)

And, I used to have the problem that my Gnome config would get screwed up and I'd have no idea why, nor what file to blow away to fix it. I'd end up blowing away my .gnome directory (effectively) and starting over in the GUI config. (Nowadays I use fvwm which has a nice text-editor-based cofig system that's geek friendly. Not user friendly, but then, I'm a geek.)

-Rob

As far as I know, the only way to get it is through Debian, but it is easy enough to compile.

Rxvt has a whole plethora of configuration options, so many that most distros just pick one or two of the "most popular" (which usually means whatever the person packaging it thinks--often enabling as much stuff as possible) and package those up. If you get the rxvt source distribution and build it yourself (which doesn't take more than a few minutes) you can get a very workable xterm emulator without the extra cruft you don't like, and still be able to add in just things you do like. Examples of available options, in addition to the X scrollbar, include 256 colors, transparency, XPM backgrounds, menubar, handling for X resources, mousewheel support, etc. Even utmp/wtmp population.

Also, I find it very stable; I've used rxvt for years and years, since the days when it was bundled with fvwm.

In my environment I use _tons_ of rxvt's. I use the window manager's menus to choose them. Tabbed browsing seems cool, but my setup is very customized so that I have buttons that invoke rxvt's which do all kinds of special things like log into remote hosts, set to special environments, etc. I don't know how to connect my buttons up to gnome-terminal with some kind of remote command to tell it to create a new tab in some particular instance, containing a session with specific characteristics. Finally, in my experience as with other comments here, the new emulators tend to have redisplay and scrolling that's far too slow.

-- alonzo

Now if you are talking about terminal emulators for 5250 terminals, that's a whole different story. In that case I like tn5250 but even more so x5250 because I wrote x5250 :)

In total, <b>there is no terminal emulator with which i'm 100% happy</b>.

I'd love antialiased fonts, but the gnome-terminal sometimes causes the xserver to take up a lot of CPU (peaks lasting a couple of seconds; if i had a reliable way to reproduce this i'd report it... must be something like the xserver forgetting the font, then having to regenerate it for AA), i'm really annoyed by that. Konsole without KDE is a desaster. Putty has the window resizing issues and i really hate its configuration menus.
I'd like a stripped down xterm (i do not need any menu) but rxvt appears to be dead upstream.
In fact i dislike all the bells and whistles. What i expect from a terminal emulator is to have UTF-8 support, scrollback and to be fast. I don't need much else: if you want tabs, use a window manager that can do so. ;-)
Also i dislike any kind of menu, scrollbar or configuration dialog that is not integrated into my desktop. For me this means: either do not provide such things, or use GTK. But this is my taste.

Also, changing gnome-terminal key mappings is completely non-obvious, indeed I havnt found a way yet. Though thankfully most of the default key-bindings are unobtrusive, however I havnt found how to reconfigure them (Sun ship gnome-terminal with pageup/pagedown bound to scroll up/down, no obvious way to change it).

If it werent for those things, the right-click issue in particular, i'd switch from xterm to gnome-terminal.

All the terminals I have tried (konsole, gnome-terminal, xterm, rxvt) all seem to exhibit this.. so I am figuring I must be doing something wrong :).
It pretty much happens right after I move past the 81-84 column...

oh well.. I should be happy to be blessed with vision that can read such small characters.

On gnome one can configure <Ctrl> key to locate the pointer. Use Preferences-->Mouse-->Cursors to set it.

1. Antialiased fonts. Does anyone here use LCD monitors at all? The new subpixel antialiased fonts are head and shoulders above any of the fonts that used to come with xterm. On a conventional CRT monitor I can see why people might prefer their old fonts, but for me the increased clarity of properly antialiased LCD fonts alone is enough reason to switch to a new terminal, no matter what the performance penalty.
2. UTF-8 support. It's ultra cool that I can fire up vi and edit Japanese and Chinese text at the same time. Even if this could somehow be done with xterm, you would need the previously mentioned antialiasing to make it look decent. For a good half of the world UTF-8 support is a mandatory, not optional, feature.

xterm -fn '-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1'

Well, recently, I gave up KDE in favor of a XFCE, and wanted to remove KDE and all of it's dependencies from my limited HD. Also, Konsole requires arts which causes problems on my aging laptop (which has suffered a partial audio hardware failure).

So I've tried to find a term that has (a) tabs, and (b) different backgrounds (even a solid color would do) for different tabs, and guess what. There are none. The closest I've gotten is eterm and 'screen'. This gives me my tabs, but not different backgrounds, and screen has its own limitations.

The other options would appear to be fluxbox, which uses the WM to do tabbing and would let me set up an environment I'd like, but I just can't seem to make fluxbox give me an environment I like.

I've tried gnome-terminal and powershell (which have slightly fewer dependencies), but couldn't get it to either to give me different backgrounds per tab, and overall just found them a bit cumersome to use.

So while I agree that there are great terminals out there, trying to find ones with advanced features with minimal dependencies is not easy.

As for colors, I finally gave up trying to find a combo I wanted to stick with. Instead, I found a whole class of background colors I like. So I wrote an xterm starter in Perl that picks a suitable background color for me at random from those that meet my criteria. It gets called when I click on one of those new-fangled icon thingies at the bottom of my screen. It's a work in progress that sort of stopped progressing when it got good enough. Yeah, it's a resource hog, but they're my resources. (Oh, and the indentation/brace placement style you've never seen before is as God intended. :) Here goes. Enjoy:

#!/usr/bin/perl
my @colors = ( 'wheat' );
if ( open COLORS, "/usr/X11R6/bin/showrgb|" )
    {
      my ($minc, $mind, $maxd ) = ( 127, 7, 97 );
      while (<COLORS>)
        {
          chomp;
          my ($r,$g,$b,$cname) = split /\s+/,$_,4;
          next unless $r > $minc && $g > $minc && $b > $minc &&
                      abs( $r - $g) > $mind && abs( $r - $g) < $maxd &&
                      abs( $r - $b) > $mind && abs( $r - $b) < $maxd &&
                      abs( $g - $b) > $mind && abs( $g - $b) < $maxd;
          push @colors, $cname;
        }
      close COLORS;
    }
my $bg = $colors[ int( rand @colors ) ];
exec '/usr/X11R6/bin/xterm', '-bg', $bg, '-fg', 'black', '-fn', '9x15';

... knoppix being a notable exception. Even worse, it sets a semi-transparent background exposing the desktop wallpaper.

Overall, xterm rules, for sure (though lately, konsole isn't bad).

For text selection I prefer to use keyboard and since AFAIK there is no terminal emulator that allows to select program output using only keyboard, emacs or any other editor with a shell support is the only option.

XTerm*VT100*translations: #override \
Shift<Key>Return: string(" &") string(0x0A) \n\
Meta<Key>Return: string(" | less") string(0x0A) \n\
~Shift<Key>Prior: scroll-back(1,page) \n\
~Shift<Key>Next: scroll-forw(1,page) \n\
Shift<Key>Prior: scroll-back(1) \n\
Shift<Key>Next: scroll-forw(1) \n\
<Key>Delete: string(0x1b) string("[2~") \n\
<Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)

(watch out for whitespace munging: all lines but the first are indented one tab)

The Delete and Backspace bindings are probably not doing anything useful any more on a modern system, but pressing shift+return to background a job is now bound so deeply into my finger macros that I'm unlikely to be moving from xterm any time soon just for that reason alone

terminal emulators that support bidi (to the best of my knowledge):

* konsole, as of KDE 3.2
* mlterm
* xiterm
* Maybe emacs, with the bidi support patch

I generally dislike knosole, and I certainly don't need it to drag all the noisy KDE daemons with it. One of its nice feaatures is that I can disable the bidi support (and even set a shortcut for that).

mlterm has most of konsole's features (except, probably, bookmarks).
allows temporary disabling of bidi support at run-time (though I'm not aware of any keyboard shortcut for that. It requires using a UTF-8 locale for bidi support (no a big deal, as usually one does not need any other locale).

xiterm uses the i18n code Sun release two years ago. It does not seem to be well-maintained and does not seem to be very potent.

I always assumed it was related to memory usage but I have not tested that theory.

Instead of building their own multiple-termials imlpementation, they chose a wrapper around screen. screen has a very mature multiple-sessions implementation which is highly usable.

An extra atvantage: you should be able to switch between displays.

Both xterm and Gnome Terminal paste from both PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD when using <shift><insert>, whereas Konsole appears to paste only from CLIPBOARD. I don't know if this is configurable or not, but it drives me nuts if I can't paste from PRIMARY with the keyboard. Konsole is otherwise a fine terminal program.

And, as for fonts, I use a non-standard font: "-jmk-Neep Alt-Medium-R-Normal--15-140-75-75-C-80-ISO8859-1"... (Which can be gotten from http://www.jmknoble.net/fonts/...) I like it because it's one of the few I've found with a dotted or slashed zero... It really, really annoys me (and, makes programming really difficult) if I can't tell my O's from my 0's! ;-)

But, the one thing I really wish for in a Linux terminal emulator is support for a MUCH wider range of emulated terminals... Most of them pretty much only emulate vt100, or some sub/super-set thereof... Which, of course, is all you need to interact with most Unix software... However, it'd be nice to have the option to emulate other types of terminals, if you ever need to connect to some system that expects some particular type of terminal... (Eg: what I REALLY want is a terminal emulator that runs on Linux which accurately emulates a QNX console/terminal... Because, I often connect to QNX machines at work from my Linux machine at home... I've managed to coerce a customized xterm with customized terminfo setting on the QNX box to work well enough for me, but I'd still much prefer a true QNX terminal emulation...) There are hundreds of such terminal emulators on Windoze, which emulate damn near everything in existence... But, on Linux (and, all other Unices, I think), everyone just seems focused on vt100 and friends, and ignores pretty much everything else (except weirdo stuff like Tektronix, which was mentioned in the article)... Why is that?? Or, am I missing something? Anyone know of such a wide-ranging terminal emulator (or, just one that supports QNX terminal emulation)?

http://ftp.x.org/pub/R6.4/xc/programs/xterm/

I thought I heard they were going to Open Source some code. Is it any better than Dickey's xterm?

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devel-list/2003-December/msg00085.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-redhat-list/2002-September/msg00015.html
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/FDU.html#XFT
(there was a better mail but google isn't finding it for me)

If you want an old X bitmap font, just install it. They aren't in the default install because in OpenOffice for example you'd have a huge font list where almost all the listed fonts were hideous bitmap fonts that wouldn't print properly. Thus the default Fedora/Red Hat configuration is to only have a few bitmap fonts in the bitmap-fonts package. But you can easily add any of the old PCF fonts that you want to have.

It sounds like some people are also still missing that GDK_USE_XFT toggled the font subsystem in use, not whether to antialias. The right way to disable antialiasing (and with GTK+ 2.4, the only way) is to configure fontconfig not to antialias as jamesh posted about above - not to change the whole font backend. Changing the backend just disabled AA as a side effect since the old deprecated backend doesn't do AA.

And, as you point out, you can change what these colors are, so you aren't
stuck with the standard ones.

What you seem to really want, though you don't say it, is a new set of
escape codes which allow use of any color, or at least color themes like
"ESC-[-3-T-<name>-;" where name can be something like "text_background".
Or maybe a way for clients to override the ANSI color pallette with new
colors. Then you could have your login scripts print out the magic codes
without having to know what kind of terminal emulator you were using. It
could be wrapped in a nice program "setansi -red e02020 -yellow e0e010"
or similar. Maybe there could be a .ansirc and you could do "setansi
-profile work" or "setansi -profile home".

It would be nice the terminal codes could be standardized in an open forum
with input from many developers (application and terminal emulators) than
for one terminal program to silently implement it. There are far too many
undocumented extensions already.

Lol. Anyone who really believes this should try communicating with other people with gesticulations (Gesticular User Interface: GUI) instead of verbs, nouns, adjectives, sentences and punctuation.

A sentence is the smallest coherent unit of verbal meaning. A command is the human machine communication equivalent. Using machines without the power of verbal communication in situations where this can be useful is for dumbing- down merchants and people who want the machines to make their decisions for them.

My comment on this whole deal is that though very functional, Gnome-Terminal and Konsole are both slow to start. I've found that for me, the best blend of speed, readability with default colors, and functionality is aterm. (with -rv, 'cuz I like black background on my terms)

I've got a big monitor, and as such, I don't tend to care for tabbed Terminal sessions - just the ability to launch another one very quickly to be shoved over to one side of the screen. Aterm launches very quickly off my XFCE launch bar.

1. Selecting text (characters, words, lines and every thing between left mouse btn and right mouse button click)

2. Ctrl+middle button to Clear and reset saved lines, great when compiling pl/sql packages.

3. Scroll bar usage

Nothing really comes close. Would be great if there was an X app that would swallow requested appas and present them in a tabbed window.