Every terminal emulator I've tried ... [LWN.net]

Every terminal emulator I've tried ...

Posted Jun 4, 2004 20:58 UTC (Fri) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

Has occasionally given me odd behaviors --- something that is not quite bug-compatible with xterm's own VT terminal emulation.

The native xterm and Putty (on Windows) are the two best that I've found.

As for most other "grumpy" features, I use screen. This is better than "tabbed" sessions for me (takes up no screen real-estate), gives me a searchable backscroll buffer, keyboard driven cut-n-paste, offers the multi-user option if I want someone to be able to connect and work with me or just watch what I'm showing them (read-only mode if I like), and lets me yank my text sessions over to another connection (detach and re-attach).

screen even preserves my vital text/curses applications through the occasional windowing system crash (assuming that the rest of the system is still accessible).

So I think I'll stick with my "screen session in an real xterm" approach for the foreseeable future!

JimD

PuTTY now on Unix

Posted Jun 5, 2004 9:15 UTC (Sat) by ayeomans (guest, #1848) [Link]

Only just discovered that PuTTY beta 0.54 has the major addition of running on Unix. Nice!

Every terminal emulator I've tried ...

Posted Jun 7, 2004 14:52 UTC (Mon) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link] (5 responses)

Screen is brilliant, but doesn't everyone find the default escape character of crtl-A really annoying? This has made me give it up, despite it's advantages. I use ctrl-A a lot to get to the beginning of a line and thus you have to use screen rigorously everywhere so that's it's always ctrl-A A - having some terms with screen and some without is hopeless. I realise I could change it but the point about terms is that you use them all over the place, sshed into lots of machines (or at least I do), and that's just too many places to change to make consistent, and to keep changed over updates.

So I've ended using multi-gnome-terminal which is a nice simple terminal but with tabs, which I do find extremely useful. Since I started, gnome-terminal has gained tabs, but gnome-terminal sucks up ALT-function-key combos and thus is incompatible with midnight commander, which is completely fatal IMHO. So I have stuck with multi-gnome-terminal. I don't understand what the relationship between these two is - I hope MGT won't disappear.

Every terminal emulator I've tried ...

Posted Jun 8, 2004 0:59 UTC (Tue) by mbp (subscriber, #2737) [Link]

I always start screen with the escape bound to backtick, because I don't use that nearly as much as C-a.

If you just start it with

screen -e '``'

then it will be fine.

In bash/zsh/kzsh you can write this instead of using backticks

less $(locate hello.c)

or just press backtick twice.

Every terminal emulator I've tried ...

Posted Jun 10, 2004 13:59 UTC (Thu) by aigarius (subscriber, #7329) [Link]

You can disable the ALT feature in gnome-terminal, also the default assignment of F10 to go to menu can be easily disabled in profile settings.
Acctually that is the first thing I do when I sit down at a new PC.

Every terminal emulator I've tried ...

Posted Jun 13, 2004 22:59 UTC (Sun) by EricBackus (guest, #2816) [Link]

As an emacs user I found that screen remapping ctrl-a was unacceptable. I
don't have much use for screen anymore, but when I did always used ctrl-z
instead of ctrl-a. If you think about it, it makes sense - ctrl-z is
usually used to suspend the current process, and what you're trying to do
with screen is suspend the current shell. Kind of.

multi-gnome-terminal

Posted Jun 20, 2004 16:45 UTC (Sun) by ela (guest, #22463) [Link] (1 responses)

I use multi-gnome-terminal, too. While it has URL highliting, I haven't found out yet whether it also has URL handling, i.e. that one clicks on an URL starting with "http://" and having it open it in your favourite browser. Is this configurable, and how?

Re: multi-gnome-terminal

Posted Jun 24, 2004 12:58 UTC (Thu) by sckramer (guest, #22557) [Link]

Try ctrl+middle mouse button. Configurability is a little bit of an issue, it seems to not listen to any off the mechanisms available on my Debian system: /etc/alternatives/, sensible-browser, gnome settings, all of which are pointed to firefox. Yet it manages to start up plain mozilla on all URL's I click. Couldn't find anything in the documentation. Anyone for a solution (other than sym-linking /usr/bin/mozilla to firefox)?
For the rest MGT is great. It is the only terminal I can find with tabs and configurable shortcut-keys for self-defined 'tab-profiles' (unlike konsole and gnome-terminal), which is handy if you log into different computers regularly

Every terminal emulator I've tried ...

Posted Jun 18, 2004 2:06 UTC (Fri) by scottie (guest, #22406) [Link]

If you use a decent window manager (FVWM), you can get tabbed terminals with ANY terminal emulator.

http://users.tpg.com.au/users/scottie7/fvwmtabs.html

Actually, you can tab any program. It's even possible to have different programs on each tab.