New goodies omitted from the review [LWN.net]

New goodies omitted from the review

Posted Jun 5, 2004 0:43 UTC (Sat) by djao (guest, #4263)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

The review, while rightly congratulating the enhancements in gnome-terminal and konsole, left out some new goodies that I consider of primary importance:

Antialiased fonts. Does anyone here use LCD monitors at all? The new subpixel antialiased fonts are head and shoulders above any of the fonts that used to come with xterm. On a conventional CRT monitor I can see why people might prefer their old fonts, but for me the increased clarity of properly antialiased LCD fonts alone is enough reason to switch to a new terminal, no matter what the performance penalty.
UTF-8 support. It's ultra cool that I can fire up vi and edit Japanese and Chinese text at the same time. Even if this could somehow be done with xterm, you would need the previously mentioned antialiasing to make it look decent. For a good half of the world UTF-8 support is a mandatory, not optional, feature.

I think both of these features are more important than the relatively trivial details like configuration profiles or bookmarks that were highlighted in the article. In my case I literally would still be using GNOME 1.4 if not for the new antialiasing and UTF-8 capabilities.

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New goodies omitted from the review

Posted Jun 5, 2004 1:35 UTC (Sat) by piman (guest, #8957) [Link] (6 responses)

I don't know what version of X you're using, but in Debian you can get a UTF-8 capable xterm with 'apt-get install xterm'. :) And the fonts, while not as pretty as the subpixel rendered ones in my GNOME terminal, are still readable.

xterm UTF-8

Posted Jun 5, 2004 2:06 UTC (Sat) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link] (5 responses)

I use Fedora 2 with the default xorg 6.7.0. The version of xterm included therein does indeed support UTF-8, but it can't display anything with complex characters such as Chinese (if you try, everything comes out as invisible square boxes).

xterm UTF-8

Posted Jun 5, 2004 4:28 UTC (Sat) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] (4 responses)

That just means that the font xterm is using has no character to represent a given code point. Try a more complete font.

xterm UTF-8

Posted Jun 5, 2004 5:33 UTC (Sat) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link] (3 responses)

That just means that the font xterm is using has no character to represent a given code point. Try a more complete font.

Hey, thanks for the tip. I got xterm working with CJK using

xterm -fn '-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1'

Not that I'll ever remember that specific font, but I know what to google for if I need it.

What I did notice, however, is that many (all?) of the fonts recommended by previous posters above do not include complete support for the particular unicode characters that I need. It seems that only a small subset of the fonts include such support, which is not ideal, although it sure is better than none.

That and the fact that CJK characters benefit greatly from antialiasing mean I'll stick with gnone-terminal, but at least now I know how to use xterm if I have to.

xterm UTF-8

Posted Jun 5, 2004 6:40 UTC (Sat) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

That and the fact that CJK characters benefit greatly from antialiasing

That's because you used -fn to specify fontname, which specifies an "old" core font name. Try using -fa instead, eg -fa fixed or -fa MiscFixed.

xterm UTF-8

Posted Jun 5, 2004 7:37 UTC (Sat) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link] (1 responses)

Interesting... on my unmodified Fedora 2 installation, neither of your suggested fonts for -fa gives antialiasing. What did work was "-fa Monospace", which produced subpixel antialiased fonts just like gnome-terminal. However, using this font, the chinese characters were again missing.

By this point in the thread it seems clear to me that xterm does have the features I mentioned, but they are not enabled by default and it is a nontrivial effort to get them all working together at the same time (at least on Fedora).

xterm UTF-8

Posted Jun 8, 2004 15:10 UTC (Tue) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link]

That's interesting. I hadn't realized there was anti-aliased font support
in xterm at all. But after playing with the -fa and -fs options for a while
I wasn't able to find any good terminal fonts. Most are not monospaced and
have too many serifs or are too wide for me to use. And xterm seems to
silently accept bad xft font names and just use an internal default. Is
there something like xfontsel for the FreeType fonts?

uxterm

Posted Jun 5, 2004 13:03 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

Actually the comment about xterm not being developed anymore is incorrect. xterm has been used by the XFree folks as a test program for i18n support.

If your system has a non-ancient glibc (>= 2.2 . e.g: RH>= 7.0) you should use the UTF 8 locales and uxterm instead of xterm.

uxterm is a simple script that runs xterm, with the added switches to get into UTF-8 mode, and a different class name (so you could use a different font for xterm and for uxterm).

The copy that came with RH7.3 showed me properly all the Korean and Russian spam I got (with mutt). And natually it showed Hebrew in vim, mutt and elsewhere.

uxterm

Posted Jun 6, 2004 19:11 UTC (Sun) by Dom2 (guest, #458) [Link]

xterm is definitely still being developed! Have a look at:

http://dickey.his.com/xterm/xterm.log.html

-Dom