Weekly edition	Kernel	Security	Distributions	Contact Us	Search
Archives	Calendar	Subscribe	Write for LWN	LWN.net FAQ	Sponsors

xterm for me, too...

Posted Jun 5, 2004 19:28 UTC (Sat) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

I still haven't found anything to beat plain old xterm, either... The biggest feature I can't live without is the complete configurability of all keys/buttons, and controlling what sequences they send or actions they perform... It allows me to use a souped-up terminfo in combination with it, so that I can write ncurses apps that, for instance, are able to intercept CTRL-arrow keys, or SHIFT-Fkeys, or etc... I haven't found another terminal emulator which allows that level of control...

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)?

(Log in to post comments)

*That's* the font I've been looking for!

Posted Jun 7, 2004 17:00 UTC (Mon) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link]

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/...)

That is damn near the perfect C programming font. Along with the O/0 distinction, Easy to distinguish 1 (number), l (ell), ! (bang) and | (pipe). Easy to distinguish (, [, {, too. First font I've found that gets all of these right.

Thank you.

(And, of course, it's been there all the time: "apt-get install xfonts-jmk".)

*That's* the font I've been looking for!

Posted Jun 8, 2004 11:08 UTC (Tue) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link]

No problem... ;-) I found it a LONG time ago, when I was similarly hunting
for a good coding font... As I said, my main requirement was a font with
dotted or slashed zeros, but the other features of the font do indeed seem
perfectly suited to my needs, as well... I'm still rather amazed that not
a single stock font seems to have dotted/slashed zeros... (Or, at least,
I couldn't find one at the time I went hunting and found the JMK fonts,
anyway... But, that was a fairly long time ago...) That's just really
weird, IMHO... When did they go out of fashion, anyway?? I can't live
without them, myself... Oh well, I'm just glad someone else apparently
can't live without them either, and created those fonts... ;-)

*That's* the font I've been looking for!

Posted Jun 18, 2004 22:40 UTC (Fri) by barrygould (guest, #4774) [Link]

Wow, with Konsole's default font on Fedora 2 ("monospace"), Zero's and Oh's are completely indistinguishable!

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono seems good though, and has the aforementioned dotted Zero.

Have to agree: xterm only way to go

Posted Jun 7, 2004 19:03 UTC (Mon) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

I've found xterm to be the least buggy terminal program, and plenty fast.
I've tried the GNOME and KDE terminals, the CDE terminal, and those were
felt klunky.

I especially hate the cut-and-paste behavior. It is so much faster to use
two mouse clicks to copy data. It is also annoying that so many newer
windowing environments take over the control key. I also like xterm's
fine grained configurability like being able to disable scroll-to-bottom
on keypress or output, and also the ability to specify exactly what
should be considered a word when double-clicking. I like being able to
bind functions like scroll-up, scroll-down, scroll-to-bottom to keypresses.
The auto-URL finders in the GNOME and KDE terminals tend to have a lot of
false positives and make for a noisy screen.

I especially hate the broken cut and paste support in the other terminals
with respect to wrapped text. xterm nicely remembers forced-wrap versus
auto-wrap so that text pastes nicely into a different sized window (this
is especially nice with long command lines).

I've used rxvt too and it's ok. But xterm doesn't really eat much memory
on a modern system. As someone else pointed out, the memory usage due to
my scrollback size is far greater than any overhead in the program.

And of course xterm is the most widely found X terminal.

There are a few problems with xterm for me:

1) The scrollbar is an ugly Athena leftover and it would be nice if you
could specify which side of the window for it to live on.

2) Getting bold, underline, and ANSI color support all at once is more
difficult than it should be.

3) A way to have multiple sessions in the same window and a way to
disconnect and reconnect. When I really need this I use screen.

4) The code is a horrible pile of nasty ifdefs and workarounds. It would
be nice to get rid of the old X11 multibyte encoding or at least bury
it under an abstraction layer that makes it possible to share the
implementation with UTF-8 support.

Have to agree: xterm only way to go

Posted Jun 8, 2004 11:19 UTC (Tue) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link]

> 1) The scrollbar is an ugly Athena leftover and it would be nice if you
> could specify which side of the window for it to live on.

It's a bit ugly, but I kinda like it... ;-) And, you definitely CAN specify
which side you want it to live on: check out the "-leftbar" and "-rightbar"
command-line switches, and/or the "rightScrollBar" X resource setting...
You can also control the thickness and color of the bar with other settings...