LWN: Comments on "The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators"

DCOP

kamathln — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 05:40:04 +0000

start konsole by giving --script option
then use the "feedsession()" method

non kde/gnome tabbed consoles

terminator — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 02:33:38 +0000

mrxvt, a successor of multi-aterm based on rxvt/aterm/eterm has been released for a while under active development. lots of features have been added, and it is pretty stable for daily use.

Re: multi-gnome-terminal

sckramer — Thu, 24 Jun 2004 12:58:56 +0000

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

The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

k8to — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 20:48:51 +0000

The athena scrollbar is a good example of an interface element which has more features but poorer intuition and usability. Given the ability to use the keyboard for advanced actions such as "page up", I say good riddance to bad rubbish. May it rest in pieces.

multi-gnome-terminal

ela — Sun, 20 Jun 2004 16:45:48 +0000

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?

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

barrygould — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 22:40:55 +0000

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.

I use background images...

gio — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 10:02:14 +0000

I also use background images - I tile a faint color image of the server name that I'm logged in to.

non kde/gnome tabbed consoles

scottie — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 02:27:44 +0000

FVWM has FvwmTabs which is a generic tabbing module.

Every terminal emulator I've tried ...

scottie — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 02:06:25 +0000

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.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

blinky — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 21:13:02 +0000

Don't really care about the eye candy. Tried gnome-terminal etc but always end up using xterm.

1. Selecting text (characters, words, lines and every thing between left mouse btn and right mouse button click)

2. Ctrl+middle button to Clear and reset saved lines, great when compiling pl/sql packages.

3. Scroll bar usage

Nothing really comes close. Would be great if there was an X app that would swallow requested appas and present them in a tabbed window.

VT100 line drawing and xterm

daniel — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 19:29:53 +0000

"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

robnsara — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 15:09:21 +0000

I happen to run a nice fast machine, (Dual Athlon 1800+, 2GB RAM, running Gentoo), and I have a need for speed.

My comment on this whole deal is that though very functional, Gnome-Terminal and Konsole are both slow to start. I've found that for me, the best blend of speed, readability with default colors, and functionality is aterm. (with -rv, 'cuz I like black background on my terms)

I've got a big monitor, and as such, I don't tend to care for tabbed Terminal sessions - just the ability to launch another one very quickly to be shoved over to one side of the screen. Aterm launches very quickly off my XFCE launch bar.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

Wol — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 12:12:52 +0000

And our terminal emulator (admittedly for Windows) also has Tektronix emulation. That's wIntegrate, now owned by IBM.

When we first started looking (early 90s) that was one of things we looked for, so it's had it for about 10 years now :-)

Cheers,
Wol

I use background images...

joib — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 10:34:59 +0000

I prefer black text on a light gray background. IMHO it's easy to read, whether the sun is shining or if I'm doing some late-night computing. Also, none of the default colors used e.g. by color ls are unreadable.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

joib — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 10:28:21 +0000

Personally I like the bitstream vera sans mono font. It's really nice for terminals and programming.

Every terminal emulator I've tried ...

EricBackus — Sun, 13 Jun 2004 22:59:35 +0000

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

scarabaeus — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 11:34:19 +0000

...plus it allows you to use any X font for display, not just scalable outline fonts. Apart from allowing me to use the font that I've been using for years, this makes it way faster than gnome-terminal.

Custom fonts

neilbrown — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 09:35:44 +0000

By "The Unix Way", I mean the "one task, one tool" paradym (sp?).
Most commonly in Unix they communicate over pipes, but I don't see that
as essential to idea. Communicating via X selections is just as valid.

It is quite likely that Plan 9 follows this "unix way" more than other derivatives.

I think it would make a lot of sense to have just one font picker, just one
colour picker, just one file picker (... are there any others), that each
app communicates with via the X server. After all, each app doesn't do it's
own window management (with some annoying exceptions like xmms). Why should
they each have their own pickers?

I don't know of any other apps that us the selection in interesting ways,
which is a shame.

memory usage

leonid — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 07:55:20 +0000

History tends to repeat itself and hardware limitations are about to get back with Linux and other OSS software gaining mobile phones, PDAs and other such devices.

Font

pimlott — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 03:14:15 +0000

Argh, I'm an idiot. I didn't have xfonts-75dpi installed.

Custom fonts

pimlott — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 03:01:17 +0000

It seems to require a full specification though; a short alias like "6x13" or "fixed" doesn't seem to work.

Works for me. I just selected 6x13 and fixed from your message.

Custom fonts

pimlott — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 02:17:11 +0000

Life changing. However, it strikes me as more the Plan 9 way than the Unix way, as it's similar to the method of executing commands in acme. Is there another Unix program that makes use of the selection for anything other than paste?

fixed font

iabervon — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 21:52:14 +0000

That's my favorite font as well, although these days I use "-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1" so that I can get a wider range of funny characters.

I use "green" on "MidnightBlue" for much the same reason that you chose your colors. I also find that my eyes have a hard time picking up dark shapes on an illuminated bright background, so light on dark is much better for me than dark on light. If I used dark-on-light xterms, I'd have to wear sunglasses to avoid eyestrain. For my color xterms, I make color1 "firebrick", color4 "DodgerBlue", and color5 "violet", which I chose to stand out on MidnightBlue.

Font

pimlott — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 21:33:19 +0000

Ok, can anyone tell me why Jon's font, -adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-m-70-iso8859-1 looks like hell (screenshot of xterm -fn -adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-m-70-iso8859-1) on my Debian testing system? These are bitmap fonts, so there's no reason they should vary at all, right? I even restarted X with different -dpi resolutions, with no difference.

I've always wondered why many of the bitmap fonts were so ugly, but maybe I'm doing something wrong? Finding a terminal font for X is a torturous process for me. I used the venerable fixed aka 6x13 aka -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1 for many years, but when I got a high-res laptop (133 dpi), that was too small. I don't even care what the font face is called, I just want a nice, clean bitmap font (a well-hinted truetype font would be fine, but the hinting patents seem to rule that out) at a readable pixel size. After much trial and error, I found terminus-16 aka -xos4-terminus-medium-r-normal--16-160-72-72-c-80-iso10646-1 from the xfonts-terminus package in Debian. But I don't understand why there isn't a font picker that can just show me all 8x16 bitmap fonts available, and why there are so many unusably-ugly bitmap fonts.

Every terminal emulator I've tried ...

aigarius — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 13:59:55 +0000

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.

Gnome-Terminal and XFT

dcoutts — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 10:43:14 +0000

I've filled a bug on this issue, feel free to add your comments to the bug report:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=144085

xterm UTF-8

Ross — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 15:10:04 +0000

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?

Conventional gooey unwisdom

copsewood — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 12:22:42 +0000

>The conventional wisdom is that, once Linux reaches a true, user-friendly
> paradise state, there will be no need for any command line work at all.

Lol. Anyone who really believes this should try communicating with other people with gesticulations (Gesticular User Interface: GUI) instead of verbs, nouns, adjectives, sentences and punctuation.

A sentence is the smallest coherent unit of verbal meaning. A command is the human machine communication equivalent. Using machines without the power of verbal communication in situations where this can be useful is for dumbing- down merchants and people who want the machines to make their decisions for them.

Have to agree: xterm only way to go

RobSeace — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 11:19:11 +0000

> 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...

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

RobSeace — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 11:08:08 +0000

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... ;-)

memory usage

KotH — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 07:51:57 +0000

Depends on where you live. In central Europe and the States, it's not
expensive to have a GB of memory (384MB is rather on the lower side ;)
I myself work with 768 (w/o any swap), at work i just got a box with
2.5GB.

But if you live in the second and third world, things are totaly different.
There, a PII is a power machine, 64MB is a lot and a 15" monitor is big.

Unfortunately, most OSS developers live in a region where hardware is
cheap, which means that they dont care whether an application wastes
a MB or not (you have plenty anyways). But this is actualy a problem
if you have to work with under 200MB of ram (had to feel that myself
when i had to use a little bit older laptop)

Every terminal emulator I've tried ...

mbp — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 00:59:07 +0000

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.

Next version of Emacs will have good support for high number of color terminals

dann — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 00:39:41 +0000

A screenshot that illustrates the support for color terminal can be found at:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~dann/multi-tty.jpg
It shows the colors used for syntax highlighting for an X11 Emacs "frame",
and Emacs frames running on a 256 and 8 color rxvts, black on white and
white on black. This shows that there won't be much difference between the appearance of text in Emacs when running on X11 and a 256-color terminal.

The Open Group Code

Ross — Mon, 07 Jun 2004 22:01:41 +0000

That code is open sourced. That's the version that all the vendor xterms
is based off of. It is the version that Dickey based his version off of.
(And I think much of his work was rolled back in.) It doesn't have all the
improvements in Dickey's code but it is largely the same. I don't know of
any advantages to going with the x.org version.

Have to disagree about color support

Ross — Mon, 07 Jun 2004 19:38:05 +0000

The set of colors isn't arbitrary, it's defined by the ANSI terminal
standard which is an extension of DEC's visual terminal specification.
Criticizing the color selecting is completely counterproductive. That
decision was made by an ANSI committe.

And, as you point out, you can change what these colors are, so you aren't
stuck with the standard ones.

What you seem to really want, though you don't say it, is a new set of
escape codes which allow use of any color, or at least color themes like
"ESC-[-3-T-<name>-;" where name can be something like "text_background".
Or maybe a way for clients to override the ANSI color pallette with new
colors. Then you could have your login scripts print out the magic codes
without having to know what kind of terminal emulator you were using. It
could be wrapped in a nice program "setansi -red e02020 -yellow e0e010"
or similar. Maybe there could be a .ansirc and you could do "setansi
-profile work" or "setansi -profile home".

It would be nice the terminal codes could be standardized in an open forum
with input from many developers (application and terminal emulators) than
for one terminal program to silently implement it. There are far too many
undocumented extensions already.

[nt] just wish it had Italics...

Luyseyal — Mon, 07 Jun 2004 19:25:59 +0000

The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

Ross — Mon, 07 Jun 2004 19:22:04 +0000

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.

Terminals crap on greater than 80 columns

Ross — Mon, 07 Jun 2004 19:10:53 +0000

But why does this work in xterm by default but not in kterm? In any case
I'm able to fix it by running the "resize" program but I shouldn't have to.

[nt] FWIW, 2.6.1 is way faster... (debian unstable)

Luyseyal — Mon, 07 Jun 2004 19:04:33 +0000

Have to agree: xterm only way to go

Ross — Mon, 07 Jun 2004 19:03:44 +0000

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.

LWN: Comments on "The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators"

DCOP

non kde/gnome tabbed consoles

Re: multi-gnome-terminal

The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

multi-gnome-terminal

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

I use background images...

non kde/gnome tabbed consoles

Every terminal emulator I've tried ...

The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

VT100 line drawing and xterm

The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

I use background images...

The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

Every terminal emulator I've tried ...

multi-gnome-terminal

Custom fonts

memory usage

Font

Custom fonts

Custom fonts

fixed font

Font

Every terminal emulator I've tried ...

Gnome-Terminal and XFT

xterm UTF-8

Conventional gooey unwisdom

Have to agree: xterm only way to go

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

memory usage

Every terminal emulator I've tried ...

Next version of Emacs will have good support for high number of color terminals

The Open Group Code

Have to disagree about color support

[nt] just wish it had Italics...

The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

Terminals crap on greater than 80 columns

[nt] FWIW, 2.6.1 is way faster... (debian unstable)

Have to agree: xterm only way to go

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

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