The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

Posted Jun 4, 2004 20:42 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

Every non-xterm I ever tried (particularly those derived from rxvt) has crashed on me. Crashing is not something I expect in a terminal emulator, or in anything, really, but browsers, e-mail readers, and, lately, window managers and desktop menu bars seem designed to crash, so much so that they have special features to "recover" better. So, I still use xterm, and I disable color when I can, for reasons Jon mentioned.

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The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

Posted Jun 4, 2004 20:51 UTC (Fri) by eigenstr (guest, #5205) [Link] (6 responses)

That, and line-drawing characters. Does anything but xterm support them?

The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

Posted Jun 4, 2004 21:00 UTC (Fri) by piman (guest, #8957) [Link] (4 responses)

"Line-drawing characters" are an object of your font and character set, not your terminal. In particular, they're used commonly in the IBM PC extensions to ASCII. Most terminals these days default to an ISO 8859-1 font, which is actually useful, or a Unicode font, in which case the application needs to understand to output Unicode.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

Posted Jun 4, 2004 21:04 UTC (Fri) by eigenstr (guest, #5205) [Link]

Not completely, at least the way I (through the man page) understand it. xterm will draw them itself if your font doesn't have them.

VT100 line drawing and xterm

Posted Jun 4, 2004 22:17 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)

"Line-drawing characters" are an object of your font and character set, not your terminal. In particular, they're used commonly in the IBM PC extensions to ASCII.

Not just that. A genuine DEC VTxxx terminal and a good emulators of it (like xterm) has also a line drawing character set, enabled by a certain escape sequence, and there are lots of "legacy applications" that use it.

By the way, xterm still beats every other X11 terminal emulator I have tried in terms of stability and quality of emulation. Even the resource use is less than in most newer competitors, except rxvt. Since a terminal emulator is something that just needs to work reliably, no eye candy needed, xterm is the best. I don't see any point in reinventing this particular wheel.

VT100 line drawing and xterm

Posted Jun 17, 2004 19:29 UTC (Thu) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link]

"xterm still beats every other X11 terminal emulator I have tried in terms of stability
and quality of emulation. Even the resource use is less than in most newer
competitors, except rxvt. Since a terminal emulator is something that just needs to
work reliably, no eye candy needed, xterm is the best. I don't see any point in
reinventing this particular wheel."

Unfortunately its widget set was designed by the criminally insane.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

Posted Jun 7, 2004 19:22 UTC (Mon) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link]

That's a different set of line drawing characters. DEC terminals have
a line-drawing mode which is not at all related to IBM or ASCII. Good
terminal emulators support this because lots of curses applications use
it to draw text-windows and similar things.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

Posted Jun 6, 2004 17:04 UTC (Sun) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Konsole and gnome-terminal both do.

You'll have to either play with your character set controls, or switch to UTF-8. Frankly, these days the latter action is actually simpler and works better: you can copy+paste a block of line drawing characters without having them end up as gibberish if both sides are UTF-8 aware.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

Posted Jun 4, 2004 21:16 UTC (Fri) by alspnost (guest, #2763) [Link]

I honestly cannot remember the last time Konsole has crashed on me. Really, I can say - hand on heart - that it has not crashed once under KDE 3.2. I use KDE on Solaris and Linux, and I've never experienced Konsole problems. Other bits crash for sure (eg Konqueror, though it gets better all the time), but Konsole's been rock solid for me.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

Posted Jun 5, 2004 19:56 UTC (Sat) by komarek (guest, #7295) [Link]

I ditched gnome-terminal for exactly this reason. The default setup seems to use the gnome factory, which means one gnome-terminal failure takes *every* gnome-terminal down. You can specify --disable-factory (I think), which doesn't seem to be documented (though a gnome dev treated me like an idiot for not knowing about it).

I switched to Eterm and haven't looked back. I used to consider Enlightenment to be bloated, slow, and silly. Then I saw Gnome and KDE, and changed my mind (after many, many years of watching Gnome get worse and worse).

-Paul Komarek