Decent Terminal Emulation on Mac OS X?

Drawoc Suomynona asks: "After settling into Mac OS X over the last four months, I'm generally impressed. However, due to the sort of development work I do, I spend a great deal of my time in a terminal. Unfortunately for me, decent terminal emulation seems to be one area where Mac OS X is quite lacking. What's your answer to the state of terminal emulation on the Mac?" Drawoc summarizes the currently available offerings and their drawbacks, below.

"Take, for instance, the following options:

• Apple's Terminal is slow (though performance has been better in 10.2.x), doesn't support xterm mousing, and for some reason refuses to send PgUp/PgDn through to any applications running in the terminal (gah!). Sure, transparency is nice, and with some hacking about (when was the last time you had to force "stty erase"?) you can get decent enough color xterm emulation, but... what's with the lack of PgUp/PgDn?
• The open source iTerm is slightly better, but, it's awfully slow (it grabs as much as 30% of the CPU per terminal instance... now imagine a full-screen vim session at 1600x1200... it's utterly unusable). It also neglects to support xterm mouse reporting.
• The closed source GLTerm ($10) is probably the best of the three "native" options, from a certain perspective. It manages to sidestep the CPU usage/UI responsiveness issue by rendering the entire terminal using OpenGL (yes, the characters are actually textures on GL primatives). It supports xterm mouse reporting. However, font choices are limited, it works only on supported video cards, and it has a very annoying "fuzzy text bug" if you set your terminal to the wrong size.
• Finally, you've got xterm :) But, it means you need to run X11 (either XDarwin or Apple's X11) and it doesn't integrate as nicely into the OS X workflow..."

So, is there a secret terminal port from NeXTSTEP lurking in the pocket of some intrepid young hacker, who is, as I write this, poised to lead us to salvation?"

Comments

Gnome term?

[m0rph3us0]

Does Gnome term compile with the OS X version of GTK? I was thinking that might be your best route.

NEXTSTEP terminal.app

[macmurph]

Here's a screen shot of the NEXTSTEP Terminal.app

http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/Terminal.jpg

ANSI color customization

[Onan]

iTerm has given me the one thing that I've found seriously lacking in Terminal.app: configuration of what colors are used to display ANSI "colors". No more screaming yellow or illegible dark blue for me, thanks.

Unfortunately, iTerm does have a few limitations and bugs:

- while the xterm-experienced will like PgUp/PgDown going straight through, and using shift for local scrolling, I'd really like to see this togglable.

- no Home/End functionality, with our without shift.

- no local Find.

- it "helpfully" doesn't include whitespace when copying out of its windows. Actually, I did want that linefeed, thanks.

- periodically decides it wants to just sit and suck all my cpu until I kill it.

- font settings don't stick between launches.

I've also found that Terminal.app's split-window function is surprisingly useful. And unique, in my experience.

TERM environment variable make a difference

[payam]

The TERM environment settings for Terminal.app make a big difference in its behaviour. Normally with Terminal it's useful to have the TERM environment variable be 'xterm-color'. This will enable lots of interesting things, amongst them ANSI color. But, as described, this has it's drawbacks, including the fact that scrollback doesn't work as expected. Sometimes it's useful to launch any apps that need that functionality prefixed with 'TERM=vt100'. I run screen this way( 'TERM=vt100 screen') and it works much better as a result.

Alas, this doesn't affect speed but it does enable improved functionality.

GNUStep?

[ActiveSX]

Perhaps you could hack the GNUStep Terminal.app to compile with Cocoa. For those who don't know, GNUStep is a GPL'd implementation of the OpenStep Specification of yore.

Re:color xterm emulation is easy in Terminal.app

[nosferatu-man]

You're better off with TERM set to dtterm, if'n your application supports it. Just in case you thought progress in computing had been made in the last 25 years, along comes a happy reminder like terminal handling to show you the error of your ways.

*scowl*

'jfb

Re:iTerm

[TomorrowPlusX]

You know, when I came over to mac from linux/kde about 6 months ago, the first thing I did was install iTerm so I could have the tabbed terminal interface I had under KDE.

But, then I discovered cmd-~ will switch between windows; particularly at the time I was debugging an IPC implementation I was working on and as such needed to view two terminal outputs simultaneously -- I discovered that apple's stock terminal works great, for me at least.

Frankly, who needs tabs when you can command-tilde to switch, and command-m to minimize unneeded windows?

I would never have believed it but the mac snobs are right: tabs actually *are* a stopgap for an inadequate window management paradigm.

Learn to love cmd-~