KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 14, 2021 7:42 UTC (Sat) by oldtomas (guest, #72579)
Parent article: KDE Gear 21.08

xterm!

Sorry. I can't help it. I have tried quite a few of those terminal emulators. I've always come back to xterm. It just does what it's expected to, doesn't play tricks on me and talks fluently Unicode.

What's not to like?

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 14, 2021 8:12 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (11 responses)

In the late 1990s, I was perfectly happy with xterm.

I am no longer perfectly happy with xterm. There are several things about it that annoy me more than any shortcoming of, say, LXDE's lxterminal, and only some of them are on the list below:

uses X resources for configuration
has very limited (or if it isn't very limited, that fact is not comfortably interactively discoverable) ability to update the configuration of the running terminal
has no readily visible mechanism for snapshotting the configuration of the running terminal to a config file
defaults to a bitmap font that feels like it was designed for use on 75dpi displays

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 14, 2021 16:37 UTC (Sat) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (10 responses)

Also... No tabs, no right-click on urls, no reflow on resize, no profiles, no infinite scrollback. I live in konsole, and I am so happy it's still actively developed.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 15, 2021 7:31 UTC (Sun) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (9 responses)

OK, thanks for that list of points, which, for me, confirms that I'm not missing anything I'd like to have:

- uses X resources for configuration
To me a desirable feature, not a bug.
- has very limited [...] ability to update the configuration of the running terminal
It seems we use terminals very differently.
- has no [...] mechanism for snapshotting the configuration [...] to a config file
I /like/ X resources. Perhaps I'm weird
- defaults to a bitmap font [...]
I changed that default long time ago. X resources, you know :)
- No tabs
I find those confusing and awkward (the browser nearly /forces/ me to use them, so I have the chance to try) But my window manager is most probably different from yours.
- no right-click on urls
Luckily
- no reflow on resize
Pretty useless for commands whose output is aware of window size (try `ls')
- no profiles
X resources
- no infinite scrollback
10000 is pretty near infinite. For more, less is better.

So yep, thanks. I'm definitely an Xterm user.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 16, 2021 20:21 UTC (Mon) by dfsmith (guest, #20302) [Link] (1 responses)

Sounds like XTerm needs a "Hey kids! Get off my lawn!" feature. B-)

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 19, 2021 10:09 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

No need. One of the nice features of xterm is that it's so unfashionable, that it is not taken over by people who want to "improve" it (e.g., along the lines suggested by mpr22 and halla), unlike some other formerly trusty tools that have been "improved" and broke my scripts or workflows. And I am happy that there is stuff like konsole and gterm that these people can "improve".

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 19, 2021 14:44 UTC (Thu) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link] (5 responses)

> I /like/ X resources. Perhaps I'm weird

Perhaps ;) To me they've reached an inscrutable level of baroque complications. I could do without a configuration GUI, but please give me an app-specific vaguely-toml-like config file.

> - no profiles
> X resources

How do you get profile-like functionality (switching between different config sets) with X resources ?

> - no reflow on resize
> Pretty useless for commands whose output is aware of window size (try `ls')

Still very useful with `ls` and the likes. Your output doesn't disappear when you resize, that's the point.

> 10000 is pretty near infinite. For more, less is better.

Agreed (though I've missed some stuff with 10K scrollback and now use 50K).
Now wouldn't that huge scrollback buffer more valuable if your terminal had a decent search feature ? ;)

> - No tabs
> - no right-click on urls
> It seems we use terminals very differently.

While you may not need this or that feature 99% of the time, it's great to have it when you need it. To me, other Konsole "killer features that I rarely use" include changing the character encoding, duplicating input to multiple tabs, splitting views, or quickly getting the font size just right for my current level of eye fatigue or shared screen presentation.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 19, 2021 15:12 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (4 responses)

Hm. I get most of this with tmux (split windows, synchronized input, scrollback, etc.). The font switching is obviously outside of its control, but urxvt has some modicum of support for switching at runtime. That's rare enough today that it's not too bad, though I suspect that will change as I age.

I can't say I've ever wanted to change the encoding, but I also rarely interact with non-Latin scripts (meaningfully).

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Sep 10, 2021 19:55 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

tmux's scrollback is not good enough! ;) While I'm very happy to see konsole gaining split panes (how long's it had that?) I remain welded to terminator because it uses a nice feature added to vte a while back: your scrollback is compressed, encrypted and written to a deleted file (by default) in /tmp, so that infinite scrollback can be as infinite as your disk space and you don't need to worry about it running you out of memory. I have personally ended up with hundreds of megabytes of scrollback in a single tab -- yes, searching in there takes a few seconds, but it's a lot better than not having the content to search at all.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Sep 11, 2021 3:01 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I guess I don't use the scroll back as much. Usually I'm cognizant enough to remember to pipe to less when I need to, but I haven't noticed a need for hundreds of mega at least. I also tend to open new panes and shells a lot, so I don't have many long-lived ones that aren't in mutt or nvim either.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Sep 11, 2021 10:41 UTC (Sat) by Jonno (subscriber, #49613) [Link] (1 responses)

> I remain welded to terminator because it uses a nice feature added to vte a while back: your scrollback is compressed, encrypted and written to a deleted file (by default) in /tmp, so that infinite scrollback can be as infinite as your disk space and you don't need to worry about it running you out of memory.

Konsole has a similar feature. If you set the scrollback buffer to infinite it is written to a deleted file in (by default) ~/.cache/konsole. It is not not compressed and encrypted, but otherwise the feature seems identical.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Sep 15, 2021 12:28 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The encryption, at least, is fairly important: without it, if /tmp is not a tmpfs, anyone stealing your machine later on and looking at unallocated portions of its disk will have access to large chunks of unencrypted scrollback. The vte developers thought this was a fairly bad thing... the compression is just useful because console output is terribly repetitive. (Doing both is surely harmful to the encryption, but these aren't national security secrets we're writing out here.)

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 19, 2021 15:44 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

The single feature that made me stop using xterm over a decade ago was scrollback search.

Namely, that it doesn't have it, and every other terminal does.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 19, 2021 9:56 UTC (Thu) by gip (subscriber, #20897) [Link] (2 responses)

What I'd like to see in Konsole is a way to change the behaviour of the mouse pointer: turning into that almost invisible thing (and really invisible after 5 sec) means I spend a lot of time looking for the cursor as I work almost all the time in one of the Konsole window I have (with a few tabs each).
I had to learn to use CTRL-PgDw/PgUp to switch tabs as I cannot find the damn pointer!

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 19, 2021 13:50 UTC (Thu) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link] (1 responses)

If using Kwin, try enabling the "system settings -> desktop effects -> track mouse" effect. It'll make your cursor very visible when pressing the configured keys. Useful outside of Konsole too.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 19, 2021 22:35 UTC (Thu) by gip (subscriber, #20897) [Link]

Thanks, this makes things a little better.