A look at Xfce 4.2 [LWN.net]

A look at Xfce 4.2

Posted Dec 5, 2004 2:16 UTC (Sun) by sfink (subscriber, #6405)
Parent article: A look at Xfce 4.2

I would be happy with xterm if it weren't broken. No terminal emulator I have found so far can deal correctly with multi-line strings. I'm not talking about cutting & pasting -- I recognize the difficulties of that. I'm just talking about typing in a line with more characters than the width of your terminal, then doing some combination of backspacing past a line wrap, retyping text forward past a line end, and recalling commands from history. Perhaps you need a nontrivial prompt to confuse it too? (Nothing fancy, just display the user and part of the path.) Every terminal emulator I've tried gets some part of this wrong, although it always kinda works enough that I haven't been able to track down an exact example of how to make it flake out. I run into this several times a day. It will put the cursor in the wrong place on the line, or make the whole line invisible, or do all kinds of other crap.

I used to use xterm until it pissed me off with this. So I switched to rxvt, which seemed slightly better but still quite broken. Purely because it was preinstalled everywhere I went, I eventually switched to gnome-terminal. Older versions of that were about the best I'd seen, but still broken. Newer versions are at least as bad as xterm. Those are the main ones I've used; the half-dozen or so minor ones have either had that problem or other problems large enough to keep me away. (The emacs shell has never flaked out on me, admittedly. But I'd rather not always use emacs when I want a terminal!) I haven't tried the Xfce one yet.

I probably only notice it because I'm crazy. Wrong in the head. Delusional. But shouldn't this, the very basis of any unix-like environment, work by now? I've heard rumours that at least one or two other people out there besides me still types stuff at the command line once in a while.

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A look at Xfce 4.2

Posted Dec 6, 2004 12:53 UTC (Mon) by petebull (guest, #7857) [Link]

> I haven't been able to track down an exact example of how to
> make it flake out.

PBKAC:
info '(bash)Printing a Prompt'

Last 2 entries in the Escape characters table:
\[ - Begin a sequence of non-printing characters
\] - End a sequence of non-printing characters.

You want these around the fancy part of your prompt.

A look at Xfce 4.2

Posted Dec 7, 2004 17:46 UTC (Tue) by arafel (subscriber, #18557) [Link]

As the original submitter says, you can get it with just "user@host:path$ ". It seems to happen for me when the prompt is at the very bottom of the xterm, and you type a line that wraps. konsole 1.2 from RH9 KDE 3.1 then breaks; the one in current Debian unstable doesn't. Haven't tried xterm for a while, but I seem to remember that also had problems.

A look at Xfce 4.2

Posted Dec 10, 2004 2:28 UTC (Fri) by mandrews (guest, #26584) [Link]

Has CDE beem released under a free license yet? If so, I think the dtterm handles all this stuff properly including the cut-and-paste. I had the same frustrations until our work systems were upgraded to CDE from HP-VUE (A few years ago, and yes that is an upgrade).

multi-line strings in the shell

Posted Dec 15, 2004 11:37 UTC (Wed) by Danimalito (guest, #26693) [Link]

If you use 'bash', try adding
shopt -s checkwinsize
to ~/.bashrc

This forces it to check how many lines and columns your terminal emulator is set to, every time it displays a new prompt. It normally does this anyways, as soon as the terminal window is resized (through the SIGWINCH signal). However, for various reasons, this signal is not always properly propagated to the shell, and it gets confused where to place the cursor in for example input that spans several lines.