xterm rules [LWN.net]

xterm rules

Posted Feb 3, 2006 10:54 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: Openbox: A lightweight window manager (Linux.com) by zblaxell
Parent article: Openbox: A lightweight window manager (Linux.com)

Another reason why xterm still is an improvement over all of its successors is that it has the most reliable terminal emulation of them all. With all others I have had glitches with some character-mode app or other, never with xterm. No doubt this is partly because it has been around for long and apps (and libraries like curses) take its behaviour into account, but it still means the "competition" is at disadvantage (xterm emulates xterm perfectly, others just try to be compatible with it...).

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xterm rules

Posted Feb 3, 2006 17:29 UTC (Fri) by tjw.org (guest, #20716) [Link]

I could probably count on one hand the number of days in the past decade that I have NOT used xterm. It terms of PID's it has to be the binary i've run the most in my life. That's all well and good, but what is truly mind bogglingly amazing is that this is probably the ONLY piece of software that I have used regularly that has NEVER segfaulted on me.

/me knocks on his desk

xterm rules

Posted Feb 3, 2006 19:26 UTC (Fri) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

I suspect you may have run /bin/sh slightly more often... ;-)

xterm rules

Posted Feb 3, 2006 20:22 UTC (Fri) by tjw.org (guest, #20716) [Link]

Nope. I used to use tcsh, but switched to zsh a few years ago :)

Unless you're counting processes that the system runs, then I would have to concede that I run init more than anything else.

xterm rules

Posted Feb 3, 2006 21:29 UTC (Fri) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

Ah, yes, the numbers are a little different when $SHELL != /bin/sh. When $SHELL = /bin/sh, we can assume that all those little scripts that glue a Unix system together contribute to the front-runner's score, rather than a competitor's.

According to sa, my most popular executable at the moment is '")', closely followed by 'B)'. Is there some patch to acct that makes it work with 2.6 kernels, or am I missing something?

xterm rules

Posted Feb 3, 2006 20:20 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

It's even more amazing if you look at the code. Good grief but it's awful, despite Thomas Dickey's valiant attempts to clean it up.

(That's another reason I use konsole: it's a from-scratch reimplementation with all that horrible xterm grot ditched. xterm may as well be closed source because nobody human can understand it ;) )

xterm rules

Posted Feb 3, 2006 19:40 UTC (Fri) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]

I think scratchbox.org people still have some kind of a "prize"
for the person who discovers why large (distro-sized) compilations
die in the middle (of compiling X window system) when starting them
from the gnome-terminal and why compilations succeeded when done
from the xterm or linux console...

(It wasn't lack of memory, the machines had 1GB of ram. Doubling
memory from 1/2GB to full 1GB halved the re-compile time.)

Btw. I have the dim recollection that xterm should support unicode
characters (but not bi-directional text etc. that gnome-terminal
supports).

xterm rules

Posted Feb 14, 2006 5:18 UTC (Tue) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link]

Btw. I have the dim recollection that xterm should support unicode characters (but not bi-directional text etc. that gnome-terminal supports).

It can; see the uxterm script, for example. But I believe the upstream comment was about variable-width Unicode fonts, and I'm not sure xterm really supports those. Then again, I've never tried...I like fixed-width. :-)

Greg