Terminal Emulators Reviewed

An anonymous reader writes "Linux Weekly News has a now free review of terminal emulators. It might be old but still remains an important tool to many of the regulars here." If you're checking that out, it's also worth checking out Joe Barr's CLI series on Linux.com (also owned by OSDN)

Comments

Pasted article

[LincolnQ]

The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

This article is part of the LWN Grumpy Editor series.
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. Your editor, however, is a heavy command line user, and has been since, well, since he was able to get away from punch cards. Some sorts of tasks are best done in a graphical, pointer-oriented mode. But others are, truly, best done with the command line. The pure expressive power of a command-oriented interface has yet to be matched in the graphical world - at least, for a wide variety of tasks.

Once upon a time, an ADM-3A terminal looked like a very nice interface. Those days have passed, however; [xterm] for many of the years since, the definitive terminal emulator has been xterm, which was packaged with the original X11R1 release. xterm was, for its time, a marvel of configurability, with a nice set of menus for controlling its behavior, setting fonts, and providing that all-important access to the "reset" function for when it gets stuck in the VT100 graphics mode.

There is one other xterm feature which has never been matched anywhere: no other terminal emulator comes with its own Tektronix 4014 storage tube emulator mode built in. Your editor who, along with many co-workers, had sunburned his face working with real storage-tube terminals appreciated this mode at the time. It has been a while, however, since your editor (or just about anybody else) has had to run software which expects to talk to such a terminal; even so, every xterm still has a Tektronix terminal lurking within it.

In general, little has happened with xterm over the years, with the exception of the addition of color support. For the most part, development in terminal emulators has happened elsewhere. Your editor has finally decided that it is time to take a look around, and, perhaps, move beyond the venerable xterm.

But first: a word on color in terminal emulators; this is a subject on which your editor can get truly grumpy. Many developers have jumped into adding color support to terminal-oriented applications with little regard for basic human factors and usability. A usable terminal should not look like the Las Vegas strip at night. Color usage, to be effective, must be subtle and carefully thought out. In particular:

* Users must be given obvious and easy control over color usage. Different people have very different combinations of monitors, background colors, limitations in color perception, and general preferences. There is no single choice of colors that will work for any substantial portion of the user community.

* The basic nature of the human visual system is that it separates objects based on intensity differences, not color differences. If you are designing colors for a white-background display, every color you use must be, with few exceptions, a low-intensity color. Hot pink on white may look snazzy, but people will have to work hard to read it.

* Dark blue should never be used for anything somebody is expected to read. Short wavelength colors tend to focus just in front of the retina, and will thus always be a little bit blurry.

Color xterm thus fails on all counts. The colors can be configured via the X resource database, but it is not straightforward. The default colors are on the garish side, and they are too bright.

[rxvt screenshot] For years, the default replacement for xterm was rxvt. This terminal emulator is, for all practical purposes, a version of xterm with a lot of the extra stuff (such as the Tektronix mode) stripped out. It does live up to its promise of being smaller, taking just over half the virtual memory required by xterm. rxvt, however, suffers from a lack of maintenance (last release was November, 2001, with a development version showing a release in March, 2003), poor default colors, and no menus for run-time configuration. This terminal emulator has been dropped from a num

Re:Pasted article

[shic]

Once upon a time, an ADM-3A terminal looked like a very nice interface.

And just what, may I ask, is wrong with a 80x25 basic text only serial dumb term with clacky keyboard and green mono CRT?. I, like many people I know, have used ADMs (3E in my case) in preference to graphics terminals because the simple interface is pleasant when it is sufficient for the task at hand.

Re:Pasted article

[perdu]

Dark blue should never be used for anything somebody is expected to read. Short wavelength colors tend to focus just in front of the retina, and will thus always be a little bit blurry.

Holy cow! I've been using xterm for 10 years with dark blue font on white. Is this why I'm helpless, at work or anywhere, without my reading glasses? Maybe I can use red for 10 years and compensate...

Re:Pasted article

[isaac]

And just what, may I ask, is wrong with a 80x25 basic text only serial dumb term with clacky keyboard and green mono CRT?

Poor support for decent baud rates coupled with the high latency (from a human-factors standpoint) of a serial connection.

I used ADM3A's extensively in the '80s (without the optional lower case ROMs) and only last year got rid of the custom-painted VT330 and VT340 I'd been dragging around for years. They're fine for some uses, but man, I sure don't miss paging through long files at 9600 bps.

-Isaac

Re:Pasted article

[Alexis de Torquemada]

Your editor, who long since found a monospace X font which optimizes both readability and screen space, very much misses the ability to chose an arbitrary X font.

I don't understand his (her?) problem. Konsole, as of 1.3.2 (included with KDE 3.2.2), allows you to select any monospace font. gnome-terminal, as of 2.6.0, allows you to select any installed font, however they will be forced into monospace character distances, so variable space fonts will look horrible.

(Great article all in all.)

Re:Pasted article

[Stephen Williams]

My alma mater had loads of ADM3e terminals dotted around the computer science department. One student liked them so much that he wrote "xadm", an ADM3e-compatible X11 terminal emulator; it was a quite accurate emulation. (Sorry that I can't provide source; I google for it every so often but have never found it. I guess he never released it to the world).

-Stephen

Re:Pasted article

[iantri]

I think they are referring to the dark blue on black colour that gets used by ls for directories (? maybe it is symlinks?). Impossible to read.

Re:Pasted article

[shic]

Guess where I met my ADM3e experience :-)

I was never an emulated ADM fan - but I found the real thing fantastic for reading/writing casual email. The keyboards were unusually pleasant and mono green text is by far the least obnoxious of CRT displays.

P.S. To the respondent who bothered to remark on the issues with this retro-tech - please realise the comment was half-tongue-in-cheek.

Re:Pasted article

[Stephen Williams]

Guess where I met my ADM3e experience :-)

Oh cool, you're ex-Warwick? I graduated in 1998; if you were around at the same time, you might have seen me hanging around in the Fyshbowl; I was the short geeky one who wrote the second iteration of the MP3 server that ran pretty much perpetually in there :-)

The keyboards were unusually pleasant

The arrow keys always used to confound me; I guess that's what I get for being a wimpy Emacs user, not a vi user like everyone else :-)

-Stephen

Re:Pasted article

[drinkypoo]

The adm3a has a lack of support for many features which are highly useful especially on [slow] serial connections, like "windows", or separate scrolling text regions. For this reason the basic vt100 feature set is what I would consider the bare minimum. Of course, the vt100-AA had support for 132 column mode, double width fonts, and a number of other features which I never had any significant use for (except 132 column mode.) I would have liked to have used the video functionality but I didn't have any composite video devices which also had a separate connection for sync...

Re:Pasted article

[operagost]

And just what, may I ask, is wrong with a 80x25 basic text only serial dumb term with clacky keyboard and green mono CRT?

You can't play Galactic Trader on it!

Get a VT, you HEATHEN!

Re:Pasted article

[Anonymous Coward]

gnome-terminal, as of 2.6.0, allows you to select any installed font,

Does that include console fonts? I suspect not.

Re:Pasted article

[shic]

Yes - the Fyshbowl was "my" lab too... until '96 though, I'm afraid I don't remember you by name - just suggesting that you might have looked geeky doesn't sufficiently set you apart from the crowd...

The ADM cursor keys were there to teach you to go-with-the-flow. I always thought of them as an executive gimmick:-)

the only one?

[Jareeedo]

One day, dual-booting will be considered "old-school." I, and my 12 partitions, live for that day.

Re:the only one?

[Artifex]

One day, dual-booting will be considered "old-school." I, and my 12 partitions, live for that day.

That's nothing. Try dual-booting on a dual-processor, DDR RAM, dual-head box that is of course 2u ("double u") in size... and logging in twice.

Re:the only one?

[zapp]

I just use 2 computers :)

Re:the only one?

[real gumby]

One day, dual-booting will be considered "old-school." I, and my 12 partitions, live for that day.

Dude, that's not dual booting. It's duoDECIMAL booting!

Re:the only one?

[Brandybuck]

Only if you use only one partition per OS. For a Unix-like OS I would recommend a minimum of three: /, /home and swap. With a bit of care and forethought you could share home and swap among all systems, but there are still advantages to keeping them separate.

Re:the only one?

[Jareeedo]

Now thats already old-school...hehe

"Still an important tool"

[tcopeland]

....right on.

VIM and the VIM/Ruby syntax/indent files... that's all you need for some mad Ruby programming.

Re:"Still an important tool"

[Anonymous Coward]

VIM and the Funge Specification ... that's all you need for some made Befunge programming. Can my plug get modded up too?

Re:"Still an important tool"

[frodo from middle ea]

One of the most amusing thing is to see a newbie fireup a vi or VIM on a really obscure terminal emulator, which don't set $TERM right, or set it to something else.

VIM come's up with, "I don't know what terminal you are using" error. about as useful as "PC Load Letter".

And then when you very quitely type in "export TERM=vt100" , and ask them to repeat, watch the awe on their faces. priceless...

Also another tip for VIM newbies, when opening VIM on a remote machine using telnet/ssh on a terminal emulator, always use the -X command-line option, It tell VIM not to connect with the local X server and saves a lot of time.

Re:"Still an important tool"

[Anonymous Coward]

I never understood why the hell the terminal-interface for vim tries to open an X connection...

I use the screen package a lot, and often times, I will detach my session and exit X, only to re-attach my session on the console... Then when I try to open vim... Well, it tries to open an X session, and let's just say things don't work out in that regard.

It took me a long time to figure out that it was doing this, and that that's what the slowdown was for. So now I just unset the DISPLAY variable. (Terminal-interface vim will not try to muck with X if $DISPLAY is not set.)

Still. I don't understand why a terminal application opens an X connection at all. Even when it does successfully open the X connection, it doesn't seem to do anything with it; it just does the normal terminal interface. I said "vim", not "gvim"... So why is it trying to mess with X?

Re:"Still an important tool"

[frodo from middle ea]

Taken straight from VIM help files for -X option

-X Do not try connecting to the X server to get the current window title and copy/paste using the X clipboard.
This avoids a long startup time when running Vim in a terminal emulator and the connection to the X server is slow.
Only makes a difference on Unix or VMS, when compiled with the |+X11| feature. Otherwise it's ignored.
To disable the connection only for specific terminals, see the 'clipboard' option.
When the X11 Session Management Protocol (XSMP) handler has been built in, the -X option also disables that connection as it, too, may have undesirable delays.

So basically to be able to use the local X clipboard. But as I said in my previous post , no need to unset $DISPLAY, just do "vim -X".

Re:"Still an important tool"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's annoying to type -X whenever I need to edit a file. I don't want to do that. Maybe I'll just use shell aliases or a wrapper script to do this.

As for the clipboard... Who cares? It's not the job of a tty application to handle X clipboards. My terminal emulator handles selection buffers quite fine, and that's how I copy/paste between X applications.

This sounds like blatant over-coding to me. I'd disable it at build time, but I just use debian's binary packages. (gentoo fanatics and BSD users: I'm quite happy with binary packages, so please don't comment. :-) )

Re:"Still an important tool"

[N1KO]

If the person is programming in _any_ language, changing the 'term' option to something else will automatically port the code to Perl.

Re:"Still an important tool"

[shellbeach]

One of the most amusing thing is to see a newbie fireup a vi or VIM on a really obscure terminal emulator

Actually, one of the most amusing things is to see a newbie fireup vi or VIM ... and wonder why they can't type stuff :) Love those modal editors ...

Re:"Still an important tool"

[lucas teh geek]

yeah, always a laugh. even better is when they get fed up and cant figure out how to quit. esc... nope. C-c... nope. C-q... nope. ":q" isnt the first thing to come into someone head when they want to quit a program

Re:I Love Terminal Emulators

[homer_ca]

Huh? I think you mean DOS emulator. Terminal emulators are for things like DEC VT220 emulation.

TeraTerm

[pjwhite]

I use TeraTerm Pro and TTSSH regularly for accessing remote systems from my Windows machine. Very nice tools, with plenty of options.

Re:TeraTerm

[macklin01]

I used to use TeraTermPro / TTSSH as well. It was very nice, but alas, TTSSH only has SSH 1.5 and most likely won't be updated to SSH protocol v. 2.0. AFAIK, That means that you won't get the most recent security fixes, as well as other nice features of SSH v. 2.0 (like compression).

A good alternative is PuTTY. Works like a charm in all flavors of Win32.

Re:TeraTerm

[Pete (big-pete)]

I use TeraTerm Pro and TTSSH regularly for accessing remote systems from my Windows machine. Very nice tools, with plenty of options.

I used to use TeraTerm, but a couple of years ago I switched to PuTTY and haven't looked back. Great application (and just as free as TeraTerm!).

-- Pete.

Re:TeraTerm

[frodo from middle ea]

Both don't support public key authentication, only password based authentication.

And I would be damned if I sshed to my box, over public internet using my login password.
Sorry but if you want to use public key authentication for ssh, then install openssh via cygwin.

Re:TeraTerm

[archen]

Putty supports public key authentication using their key managment program, although in all honesty I haven't gotten it to work with openssl stuff.

Re:TeraTerm

[frodo from middle ea]

Yes that was my point rather.

Re:TeraTerm

[DrXym]

I used Tera Term Pro too for a long time, but recently I've switched to PuTTY which I got from OpenCD 1.4. There is little between them in terms of what they do but PuTTY feels a little bit more integrated in Windows and is more actively developed.

It's also a bit easier to set up too since SSH works out of the box without hunting around for the patch that you have to unzip over Tera Term to get it working. It also supports SSH v2.

Re:TeraTerm

[bucky0]

Umm, PuTTY does support public key authentication, I use it myself.

Re:TeraTerm

[thppt]

Absolutely incorrect, at least in PuTTY's case. I use public key authentication via PuTTY a dozen or more times every day.

I can't speak for TeraTermPro, I haven't ever used it.

Re:TeraTerm

[frodo from middle ea]

Does it work with a ssh server (openssh) , using a RSA key for authentication ? I haven't managed to get it to work, but I guess I give putty a try one more time.

Mind you I don't want to authenticate the server, what I want is the ability to get authenticated using my public key.

Re:TeraTerm

[devnullify]

Yes it does, but you need to use the putty keygen tool to convert the public key to a format putty can use. After that it's trivial..the agent is nice and simple too and works well.

Re:TeraTerm

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks for the tip, guess I wasn't giving putty enough credit it deserves.

Re:TeraTerm

[Draco_es]

Yes, but you can't use putty for serial connections. I use Teraterm for that purpose because I prefer it over hyperterminal (how do you send a BREAK with that?).

Re:TeraTerm

[bucky0]

Yes. Look at the puttykey and puttagent programs (they may be named differently, I'm not at my home computer)

On the left side of the putty connection screen there's an auth section somewhere where you can put your private key.

If I'm understanding you correct, you don't want to have to enter your account's password, just the passphrase you chose for the key, which is what I do.

Re:TeraTerm

[realdpk]

It authenticates the server and lets you use a public key to log in. You can also use the same public key with WinSCP3 (to this date, the one GPL-licensed GUI app that doesn't suck, IMO), and WinSCP3 will work with the putty agent.

Re:TeraTerm

[strabo]

(and just as free as TeraTerm!)

Actually, PuTTY is much more free.

PuTTY, from here:

The PuTTY executables and source code are distributed under the MIT licence, which is similar in effect to the BSD licence. (This licence is Open Source certified and complies with the Debian Free Software Guidelines.)

TeraTerm, however, from the readme.txt that comes with the source packages:

Without written permission by the author (Takashi Teranishi), you may not distribute modified versions of this package, and may not distribute this package for profit.

You may not copy any file, module, subroutine and resource in this package to create commercial products (including sharewares), without written permission by the author.

If you want to distribute modified versions of Tera Term widely, you need also the permission.

Re:TeraTerm

[Pete (big-pete)]

Actually, PuTTY is much more free.

Ahh - I knew the source was available for both, but I had forgotten the limitations on distribution for TeraTerm.

Thanks!

-- Pete.

Re:TeraTerm

[fm6]

Excuse me? It's very doable. I seem to recall having problems with it, but they probably relate mostly to my ignorance of PKI. I ended up generating a key with Linux SSH on the system I was trying to talk to, then importing that key into PuTTY.

Re:TeraTerm

[HogynCymraeg]

Actually I found putty to be a bit flaky when conencting to certain versions of openSSH servers. However the cygwin port of openssh has always seemed to worked like a dream.

Re:TeraTerm

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you might be talking about the arabian edition of putty because the copy I have here, which is the western version obviously, definately allows public key authentication.

Might this be something to do with you and your countrymen being personally connected to the brown terrorists?

Re:TeraTerm

[cloudmaster]

puttygen/pagent - I use them daily. They're essential to using tortoiseCVS (over ssh) under windows, IMHO... :)

Re:TeraTerm

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I didn't say it wasn't doable. Seems plenty of people have gotten it to work, just that I personally haven't. I spent an hour trying to get it to work, but eventually decided I would be better off typing my password than waisting my time getting Pagent to work. I use keys a LOT so it's not like I'm totally unfamiliar with the concept. *shrug*

yeha

[2057]

for those who haven't read the article he review, rxvt, gnome terminal, and konsole, and links to aterm, 9term, and some other thing, really not to awesome...but it is a dying aspect of linux..using the command line.

Re:yeha

[2057]

...this wasn't meant to be a flamebait.... I meant what i said, eventually computers will evolve to not need a commandline.... it happens...people don't read books anymore, because there are movies....

Re:yeha

[2057]

nice...I will keep replying til i get a positive out of this...I;m crazy! Ile goto rikers to prove my point...............

Re:yeha

[E_elven]

*looks up from Dan Simmons' "Ilium"*

What do you mean people don't read anymore? /You/ may not, but generally the more educated/intelligent folk tend to like reading.

Re:yeha

[Anonymous Coward]

Book sales may be down (about 1% last year) but that doesn't mean people don't read. It is just a lot easier to buy used books nowadays.

Re:yeha

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it? I haven't read Hyperion or any of his other stuff but somebody else had recommended it.

Re:yeha

[E_elven]

Very very good. And you must read Hyperion. Now.

rxvt is still the best...

[MarcoAtWork]

at least IMHO, minimalistic, no menu bar, nice 3d scrollbar on the left, shift+pgup/down scrolling, what more do you need? I wish the article wasn't slashdotted so I could figure out if the reviewer agrees with me or not ;)

BTW, I'm talking about 'standalone' terminals, I spend 90% of my time within emacs and its eterm works nearly as well as rxvt (a bit slower and sometimes screws up when you have long lines in your history and you want to edit them, but still good enough IMHO).

Re:rxvt is still the best...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hold the control key, then left-click an xterm.

Keep control held, and then middle-click.

Now try it with the right mouse button.

See all those menus? That's what rxvt lacks. That's what the editor was talking about, and I tend to agree. If your terminal screws up, or you want to change a setting at runtime, xterm is quite happy to help you out.

Re:rxvt is still the best...

[Hatta]

I love rxvt, but I've had trouble with it not breaking my command lines properly, especially if I backspace over the linebreak rxvt gets all confused. It's a strange problem, it doesn't always happen. Some programs mess it up worse than others, gnuplot is among the worst offenders. xterm has the same problem too. I've settled on aterm, it always breaks my command lines properly, and does pretty much everything else I need.

Re:rxvt is still the best...

[cubic6]

Strange coincidence, aterm breaks *my* command lines weird. If I type a line that wraps, it won't move that line up and start a new line, but it will just move back to the start of the line and overwrite. Then, when I backspace over the newline, it copies the line up one line and deletes the last character every time I press backspace. Really weird problem.

Love CLI

[hazy_fakie]

Finally an article on something different from GNOME/KDE/any other GUI. The only way to learn truly about an operating system is by doing things manually and this is done through CLIs. It seems that as more and more people turn to Linux and the GUIs become better and better, people tend to forget how to use the console, henceforth, the incresing number of totally lame questions that could easily be answered with rtfm. "man" was meant to be started from a console :)

Re:Love CLI

[i_r_sensitive]

Finally an article on something different from GNOME/KDE/any other GUI.

Not really, all he talks about are gnome-terminal and konsole...

Given, most of the rest are rxvt spiced up, with eye candy thrown in.

But if the grumpy editor wants to hold forth on memory usage, I would suggest he consider the overhead the gnome and kde libraries impose in order to use their terminal emulator...

Re:Love CLI

[The Angry Mick]

You know, this reminded me of something that's been tickling the back of my mind for some time now.

At the beginning of my tech career, just about everything was done through the commend line, and of course, I liked it and got somewhat good at it. However, once GUIs arrived, I dutifully switched over like a happy wage slave and gradually learned to forget about some of the more obscure CLI commands as they mostly had a GUI counterpart that at least handled the basic functions.

In the past few years, though, I've since switched a number of servers from NT to either BSD or Linux, and, as there was no need for X-Windows on any of them, I left the GUI off and managed solely from the CLI. The funny thing is, now that I've more or less drifted back into strictly CLI mode, GUI based software drives me absolutely nuts! Now whenever I need to crank out short documents or mail messages, I'm twice as likely to fire up "vi" or even Windows notepad as opposed to something like Word or WordPerfect. It's almost as if my mind has gotten so tired of the extra features found in GUI based software that its beginning to revolt, favoring the old ways over the new.

Re:Love CLI

[hackstraw]

The only way to learn truly about an operating system is by doing things manually and this is done through CLIs.

Iff your OS has CLI parallel options.

It seems that as more and more people turn to Linux and the GUIs become better and better, people tend to forget how to use the console, henceforth, the incresing number of totally lame questions that could easily be answered with rtfm.

Honestly, with how broken, half implemented, and mutually redundant between the 'g' apps and the 'k' apps, I see the Linux GUI turning people away from Linux. (Disclamer, I do everything with vim and commandline tools).

Regarding terminal apps, they are like everything else, they all pretty much suck. However, I think the Apple Terminal.app app is about the best. Why? It does auto rewraping of lines when I resize the window. Now if it only could get the copy/paste thing right and allow me to configure what "cutchars" or something so that when I double click on somehing I get all of what I want. Speaking of the "cutchars", what is even worse with the Terminal.app is that the characters for word delimination are variable. Yes, in the terminal window if you double click on 127.0.0.1 it will highlight the whole thing, if you double click on the localhost.localdomain it will highlight "localhost", "localdomain", or the "." depending on where you click.

Re:Love CLI

[Gudlyf]

A while back I recall reading (on /.?) about how Microsoft was asking for input from the community regarding what Linux has that Windows does not, ans what people would want with Windows in that respect. Besides all the obvious answers, one of the first that came to mind was the lack of a comfortable CLI. Of course there's the DOS prompt, but it's just not as easy to call an application as it is in a traditional *nix shell (let's put aside Cygwin for the moment).

What I find interesting is how so far, instead of Microsoft making their CLI easier to use, Linux is playing some sort of catch-up game with GUI's and desktops. I have to wonder if Microsoft heard the CLI issue as a major wish-list request when they did their study, and acurately concluded that users would be scrambling to make Linux ready for the desktop, not to make Windows ready to be CLI-friendly.

Sorry...mostly talking to myself here, I know. ;-)

Re:Love CLI

[On Lawn]

Given, most of the rest are rxvt spiced up, with eye candy thrown in.

I've found new life and freedom outside of Gnome and KDE lately. So I have to add that the one that stands above the rest for me is Multi-Aterm. Aterm is pretty good on its own and I used Fluxbox to trick it to do tabs. But then I found multi-aterm and never looked back. I wish the LWN author had found it, they would have found it has the "right click scroll up, left click scroll down, middle click slide-scrolling" they complainied that gnome and kde variants do not.

Re:Love CLI

[scotch]

One thing he failed to mention is that some of the newer terminals are butt slow. For example, a simple test shows that gnome-terminal is 4x slower at updating (measured with ls -1R in a big directory hierarchy) than xterm. I know this is likely because of utf support, but since I really don't need utf (if English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me), I just stick with xterm. Now if only they man page authors hadn't broken all the man pages so that I have to 'alias man="LANG=C man"'.

Also, the keyboard shortcuts for changing the font size you get with xterm don't seem to be there in gnome-terminal. I don't respect any terminal that makes you move your hands from the keyboard to do something useful.

Haven't used konsole, don't like waiting 8 seconds for my apps to start, how does it measure up on these metrics the story author neglected?

Re:Love CLI

[microTodd]

Just out of curiosity, how many Linux users out there even use the GUI features?

I use Linux every day, but all I use GNOME for is to open a bunch of terminals.

Even system configurations, I edit /etc/sysconfig/* stuff instead of using the GUI tool.

Re:Love CLI

[Brandybuck]

Haven't used konsole, don't like waiting 8 seconds for my apps to start

Something's seriously wrong if ANY KDE application takes eight seconds to start. Konsole starts for me so fast I can't time it. The slowest KDE apps are stuff like Quanta and KDevelop which fritter away two to three seconds of my life.

Are you running Konsole in the KDE desktop? If not, then you have to wait for various background KDE software to start up (dcop, kded, etc). But from within the desktop it's damned fast. Rule of thumb: don't use Konsole inside of GNOME and don't use gnome-terminal inside of KDE.

Re:Love CLI

[normal_guy]

Last I checked, moving a mouse and applying single and double clicks on a variety of mouse buttons is a 'manual' process. The computer does not perform these actions for you.

Re:Love CLI

[iabervon]

Actually, the thing I find very striking is how far CLIs have come. Sure, you can still type commands character for character. But there are a ton of useful special keys and control characters. I think my most command interaction with a CLI is up-arrow return. I also use "cd wo{tab}j{tab}o{tab}i{tab}{return}" and "up-arrow ctrl-a ctrl-d right-arrow ctrl-d ctrl-d". Then there's "ctrl-r m return". It's almost painful to watch someone actually try to type a complete command line correctly.

Over the years, CLIs have changed such that you don't actually type whole commands any more. The core point of a CLI is just that the actions are specified as text in a simple and compact format; you can see what is going to happen when you hit return. I think it would be interesting to write a command line GUI; you click on things with the mouse in order to form your command, but the command is shown at the bottom of the window, and nothing happens until you hit return or click go.

Re:Love CLI

[ichimunki]

I use the GUI and the command line equally-- on both GNU/Linux and MS Windows. However, on MS Windows, it is a much less enjoyable experience. And holy smokes, I just realized that I'm running emacs on Windows and that I need not suffer through that "Command Prompt" monstrosity ever again!

Anyway, I really do about 50/50 GUI/CLI. I like GUIs for graphics, web surfing, and other tasks that are primarily visual or where "random access" is helpful (tabbing through links on a web page gets old fast, imho-- much better to home in quickly via the mouse pointer). But the CLI is great for logging into the mp3 server and starting mpg321, systems administration, running irb (interactive Ruby shell), etc. And never forget that well-designed GUIs are largely keyboard accessible so that the hands can stay where they belong instead of switching between the rolly-thingy and the keyboard. :)

Re:Love CLI

[Anonymous Coward]

This is absolutely true, and a point that many Linux types don't seem to understand.

bash and others are much more "user-friendly" and "interactive" than their traditional unix counterparts. Try using, say, an SVR2 box from the early 1990s, and you'll start to feel like using Linux has you spoiled.

Re:Love CLI

[Anonymous Coward]

You use gnome for that? Why bother?

For me, X is nothing more than xterm and mozilla, plus the occasional xloadimage, mplayer, or gimp, etc. All under fvwm.

Re:Love CLI

[Hatta]

Question for you then. How do you get terminal.app to stop intercepting pgup/pgdown? You know, so less works.

Re:Love CLI

[Frizzle Fry]

I have to wonder if Microsoft heard the CLI issue as a major wish-list request when they did their study

Yes.

Re:Love CLI

[Dh2000]

Are you trying to say vi has no 'extra' features?

It's no emacs, I grant you, but it's certainly not slim.

Re:Love CLI

[The Angry Mick]

Not at all.

The distinction was between GUI features vs. CLI features. "Features", as I use the term, refers to all of the additional ways that a program like Word provides to fuck up a document - autoformatting, auto-outlining, Clippy, etc. Some times, I just want to type and not worry about about fancy formatting until later. Also, its just plain silly to have to load a resource hog like word when all I want to do is type a short note.

Re:Love CLI

[Anonymous Coward]

put something like this into your ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist:

<key>$F72C</key>
<string>^[[5~</string>
<key>$ F72D</key>
<string>^[[6~</string>

(note the ^[ is a literal ESC)

you can do it from the File/Window Settings/Keyboard, but it's not intuitive how to get the ESC in there.

Re:Love CLI

[shellbeach]

Finally an article on something different from GNOME/KDE/any other GUI.

Except that it's a sad state of affairs when GNOME/KDE are the only groups doing active development of a terminal emulator (at least that I can find - rxvt/aterm/eterm haven't been updated for years, and could really do with a tabbed interface).

Once I almost installed GNOME just to use gnome-terminal (except that installing GNOME from sources is soooo painful and seemed so ridiculous just to have a terminal emulator that I gave up). One of my great wishes would be for someone to remove the GNOME/Glade crud from gnome-terminal and make it a standalone GTK app (there can't be any use for specific GNOME libs in a terminal emulator ... surely!)

Re:Love CLI

[cubic6]

You're not entirely talking to yourself ;)

Windows Longhorn will have a much improved CLI, even with a shell scripting language. I've played with the alphas a little, and it's looking to be much improved. Even so, WinXP adds a lot of command line goodness that most people don't know about. I'm too lazy to find a link, but a Google query should turn info up.

Re:Love CLI

[mattkime]

With the power invested in me I hear-by proclaim you...

OLD!

Re:Love CLI

[JanneM]

Of course, you really need to consider that those libs are shared with a host of other applications as well; they are only loaded into memory once after all. If you are already running Gnome or KDE, the overhead of another application using the libs is effectively zero. So no, taking that overhead into consideration would not be honest.

Of course, when looking at Xterm or rxvt, you should not factor in the use of X libraries or libc either.

Re:Love CLI

[JanneM]

I use terminals quite a lot, of course. I've been using Nautilus a lot more for file handling recently, however; especially for handling images it is a lot more convenient than using a terminal (digital cameras are fun, but you tend to end up with a _lot_ of crappy pictures :) ).

The panel is also a very convenient aspect of desktops for me. Starting frequently used apps by clicking their icon in the panel is usually quicker than typing it in a terminal. Stuff like the desktop pager, clock, battery indicator and so on lets me eaasily see what's going on. Also, I have a few Gnumeric files I have reason to open and edit every single day, and those I have on the desktop - a lot easier to just click on one to edit it than cd:ing to the right subdirectory and running gnumeric on it.

So yes, I do use both. Both ways ow working have their strengths and their weaknesses; the trick is of course to know when to use either.

Re:Love CLI

[LurkerXXX]

So what stopped you from using notepad? Nothing.

Btw, I use pico in *nix. vi is a hog ;)

Re:Love CLI

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be thinking of vim. vi is quite lean

Re:Love CLI

[Anonymous Coward]

"And holy smokes,"

"Holy smokes????" What are you, a Mormon or something? It's "holy shit."

Re:Love CLI

[KainX]

For the record, Eterm is under active development. 0.9.3 will be out Real Soon Now(tm).

As for a tabbed interface, several other commenters have pointed out Eterm's integration with screen. Even better than tabs, IMHO, since you can detach your entire session and reattach from anywhere.

Re:Love CLI

[iabervon]

For that matter, just using /bin/sh on Solaris will drive you nuts.

Re:Love CLI

[i_r_sensitive]

I'd agree, if he was comparing Gnome and KDE. But we aren't talking about DEs, we're talking about term emulators. If I have to load that cruft to run a term emulator it is overhead that another term emulator does not need. If we want to talk about term emulators integrating with the rest of the DE fine, but it is a perfectly valid concern when we talk about term emulators.

I don't think Xlibs is so much the issue though, it is a constant to any XFree based system, so unless we talking about some other windowing system this is a constant for all, and can be safely ignored.

Re:Love CLI

[i_r_sensitive]

I'm pretty sure Jesus used Aramaic, either that or Mel Gibson has a lot of 'splaining to do...

Support LWN!

[mattdm]

This is slightly tangental, but I want to take the unsolicited opportunity to encourage people to subscribe to LWN. This is by far the best source of Linux journalism in existance. Slashdot, as we all know and love, ain't journalism. And Linux Journal and Linux Magazine are nice and all, but by the time they go to press, everything is already obsolete.

LWN, though, provides timely and actually insightful articles, including an invaluable roundup of current security issues and very good articles on the current state of the kernel. Subscriptions aren't that much, and as I can see by the way the site is hard to reach minutes after beeing Slashdotted, they could definitely use the money.

Not only do subscribers get to see the articles a couple weeks earlier than everyone else, you're also supporting an important community resource.

Re:Support LWN!

[Anonymous Coward]

I second this. And mod parent up!

Also the "Grumpy Editors" reviews are truly excellent and gives good overviews and comparisons of a lot of software out there. Do also read the followups for even more leads.

I recommend LWN to my freinds and colleagues, it is hig density news without fluff. Uh, at this point I guess I will have to point out that I am not affiliated with LWN in any way.

Re:Support LWN!

[Howard Roark]

I absolutely agree.

LWN is well worth supporting. I have a subscription and you should too!

Re:Support LWN!

[Garfunkel]

Hi Matt, long time, no talk! I have to say I agree on this. An even better solution is to get your company to buy subscriptions for everyone who wants one!

Re:Support LWN!

[docl]

They need your help. They need to hire somebody who can format there pages correctly.

Re:Support LWN!

[stevey]

And if you're a Debian developer you get a free subscription, which is a nice plus!

Re:Support LWN!

[Anonymous Coward]

who can format there pages correctly.

"their".

After 13 comments... A new record...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they have a web server emulator to go with that?

They forgot one

[ttfkam]

Mindterm.

Instead of fixating on "this one's integrated with KDE" and "this one allows profiles so you can keep your color choices", Mindterm allows SSH access from any computer with a Java-enabled browser. In many ways, that's more useful to me than the differences between the reviewed terminal emulators.

When I'm at the console, a terminal is a terminal. My choice of shell makes a bigger difference to me. When I'm not at the console, it's easier to find a Java enabled browser than someone willing to let you install Putty (if it's a Windows box).

Instead of deciding which jewel-studded hammer you'd prefer to use, I'm much more interested in the hammer that does the job but is easier to carry around or fits on my belt.

Re:They forgot one

[Paulrothrock]

Tried it. Stupid Netzis at work won't let me ssh out. Bastards.

Re:They forgot one

[ari_j]

I find it easier to just download putty.exe. Here's my standard procedure when sitting down to a Windows box that isn't mine and needing to get access to my box via ssh:

1. Open IE
2. Address: google.com
3. Search term: putty.exe
4. Click hit #1
5. Click the putty.exe link
6. Click 'Open from current location'
7. Enjoy

I'm picky about terminals - I can't use the Gnome terminal emulator because it's so dang slow. KDE's terminal emulator is much better, although it always takes me several minutes to initially get it configured to what I want and a few more minutes to get it to remember those settings. xterm is really what I use the most.

Re:They forgot one

[ttfkam]

Difference being that (a) the person who owns that computer would have to be okay with you downloading programs on their system, (b) that it's a Windows box that hasn't been locked down or that you are an administrator on, (c) that it isn't a Mac OS 9 box, etc.

I can access my server from public libraries if need be. Public libraries on the whole aren't too keen about installing random (to them) pieces of software on their computers. I haven't yet come across a library computer that didn't have Java though, but maybe I've just been lucky on my road trips.

As far as ease, what could be easier than:

1. Open IE
2. Address: your server
3. Enjoy

I guarantee you that the Java applet is a smaller download than putty. And when you're done, nothing to clean up off the machine you are using.

I have nothing against putty. I use it myself all of the time, but it's not solving the same problem I'm talking about.

Re:They forgot one

[devnullify]

$ du -h mindterm.jar
592K mindterm.jar
$ du -h putty.exe
364K putty.exe

Re:They forgot one

[drinkypoo]

Try this instead: type "putty download" and click "I'm feeling lucky".

Re:They forgot one

[ari_j]

"putty.exe" is shorter to type in, but thanks for saving me a click (in exchange for two tabs).

Re:They forgot one

[ari_j]

You misunderstood - I don't install PuTTY, I just download and run from its temporary location the executable. There are exactly three remnants when I'm done: PUTTY.RND in the user's home folder, a registry key storing the host key of my server, and the PuTTY executable file in the temporary internet files directory. Java may provide a cleaner solution, but how does its terminal emulation compare (in terms of speed, beauty, and usability)? I'll probably give it a shot sometime, but I doubt it'll be any better for me than the Java Jabber client I tried to use when on the run for a while.

Re:They forgot one

[sarastro_us]

That's why I carry an executible copy of Putty on my usb keychain drive, along with my SSH keys. Just plug it in and go!

Re:They forgot one

[ttfkam]

You'll never know until you try will you?

Re:They forgot one

[ari_j]

It's more fun to spend a day asking questions than to find out experimentally. :P

Re:They forgot one

[ttfkam]

And when you are in front of a Mac OS 9 box, what do you do then? I still come across my fair share these days. What about public library computers that don't have front-facing USB ports?

Re:They forgot one

[glitch23]

When I'm not at the console, it's easier to find a Java enabled browser than someone willing to let you install Putty (if it's a Windows box).

Putty fits onto a floppy and it's a single file. No install is actually required.

Re:I Love Terminal Emulators

[Dozix007]

Not quite, I have to use a Terminal Emulator to emulate old hardware (VESA drivers mainly).

Re:I Love Terminal Emulators

[Anonymous Coward]

Crotch. I was hoping to hear about 3270 emulators. Now those are da bomb.

Where's PuTTY?

[KlomDark]

I have been picky as hell over the years when it comes to terminal emulators. As far as windows-based emulators, PuTTY is by far the best in my my opinion. Supports telnet, SSH, Rlogin and all kinds of other things linux Linux arrow key support.

For when you have to connect to Linux from a Windows box, it's the way to go. (Although the default font [Courier New] option is horrible for a console emulator, I always change it to Terminal.)

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[Shant3030]

PuTTY is my favorite also. Three cheers for PuTTY!

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[linuxelf]

Mod parent up. PuTTY rocks. I set my dad up with it so he can create a tunnel through my firewall and access his MySQL table graphically. He can also bring up a full X session through a PuTTY tunnel thanks to Cygwin's excellent Windows X server.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[jtosburn]

Given that their site & publication is called The Linux Weekly News, I doubt they give a flying fuck about terminal emulators for Windows.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[edsarkiss]

I find "Lucida Console" to be the best terminal font available on Windows. it's a monospaced TrueType font, so you get infinitely variable sizing and antialiasing (cleartype with XP), whereas bitmapped fonts like "Terminal" don't.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[Cheerio Boy]

There's also another one I use that is simple and has an SSH extension. It's called TeraTermPro

It's older but seems to work like gangbusters.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[garyok]

Given that their site & publication is called The Linux Weekly News, I doubt they give a flying fuck about terminal emulators for Windows.

You reckon? PuTTY's what I always use to access my Linux box at home (and every other unix flavour at work) from Windows. It is the gold standard for terminal emulators, and is the standard the others should be aiming for. If the guys designing terminal emulators under Linux don't know about it, they should. It's all about working with Linux after all, and PuTTY helps you do that.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[gyratedotorg]

i agree that putty is probably the best *free* terinal emulator for windows, but there's a lot to be said for some of the commercial emulators; specifically vandyke's securecrt.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[edbarrett]

PuTTY itself is a very nice app. PSCP, the SCP client that comes along with it, doesn't work as well in my experience. Using PSCP, I get transfer rates of ~200Kb/sec on my 100Mb switched network, where using scp under cygwin (tranfsering the same file, between the same machines) regularly transfers around 1000Kb/sec. No, I haven't reported it.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[mnewton32]

Have you used the Bitstream Vera fonts? They are truly brilliant. I use the monospace for all my terminal windows.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[edsarkiss]

oooh ... that's nice.

a bit taller than Lucida Console, but i'll give it a whirl.

thanks ;-)

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been picky as hell over the years when it comes to terminal emulators. As far as windows-based emulators, PuTTY is by far the best in my my opinion. Supports telnet, SSH, Rlogin and all kinds of other things linux Linux arrow key support.


Nah... install Cygwin and use the native-Windows rxvt. I spend about half my working life in that, and I've never found anything to match it.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[pamar]

I use putty and like it, but found it severely limted regarding keyboard emulation. I connect from windows to a Sun machine to access a legacy application. Such application expect "terminals" to be vt100 or vt320 compatible. Unfortunately, some of the function keys available under vt100 do not work from putty, and I have been unable to find a way to configure it for specific key emulation. Any tips?

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[Alexis de Torquemada]

There's a Unix version of PuTTY based on GTK+. It's also in Portage, so all you Gentoo users just type

emerge putty

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[threephaseboy]

It's almost the same for me except backwards, I have gotten about 2-4MB/sec with PSCP, and around 200kB/sec with PSFTP
WinSCP2 is somewhere in the middle with 1-2MB/sec
This is with all the default settings on a athlonxp 1700 talking to a p4 1.8G linux box.
I have not tried the SCP under cygwin enough to really compare it.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[iantri]

You aren't the only one with this problem. Appearantly, it was fixed in 0.54 (well, somewhat). Try downloading the latest version.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[zapp]

Did I just miss it, or is it that no where on their site do they give a demo/screenshot/preview of what the font looks like?

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[Wise Dragon]

root# apt-cache search putty
pterm - PuTTY terminal emulator
putty - Telnet/SSH client for X
putty-tools - command-line tools for SSH, SCP, and SFTP

(Putty had become cross platform since last you looked)

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[stefanlasiewski]

I used TeraTerm for years. An excellent product, and I like some parts better then PuTTY.

However I stopped using the product because, TeraTerm's SSH extension doesn't support SSH v2.

There are many security problems with SSH v1. Nobody should use it anymore.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[Anonymous Coward]

I Putty for terminal and WinSCP3 for file transfers. Both are excellent.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. I've used PuTTY, SSH Secure Shell, and SecureCRT, and SecureCRT knocks the pants off all of them.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[drinkypoo]

I will second this. I use plink to create tunnels using key files, and start it with a shortcut which minimizes the window. Of course, the first time you have to restore it and answer yes, but after that you're good to go. I have a batch file which creates a forward and runs terminal services client, along with the TSC and plink on my flash drive, so I can remotely access my WinXP system from anywhere, securely.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[Brandybuck]

My mom sticks with Solitaire and Outlook Express, but my dad demands a tunnel through the firewall so he can access his MySQL table graphically. He's picky that way...

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[Cheerio Boy]

That's funny because I have SSH v1 disabled on my boxes and it still connects. So either I didn't really disable v1 or TTPro has some v2 functionality in it.

Still, the code can't be all that complex - I'm wondering if somebody couldn't write an SSH v2 module for it.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[jgerry]

I'll agree on this one and recommend SecureCRT as well. Sure it costs $$$ but it's HUGELY powerful and configurable.

I use it because i have very specific needs for port forwarding to access various things on remote systems (mainly Oracle databases). The ability to remap ports on both ends of an SSH connection and tunnel all that traffic through the SSH connetion saves me HOURS of paperwork dealing with having firewall ports opened on my servers at work (major telecom). Sure I could do this on Windows with cygwin or possibly Putty (not sure), but in 5 years of using this program I've never had a single issue with it. Support has been great as well.

Totally worth the money if you need that kind of thing.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[denjin]

Very true, it is what I always use, personally.

Putty is pretty good, but it lacks serial communications, which was a major issue for me (and still is I guess).

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[cubic6]

Thank you oh so much for that little bit of wisdom. I owe you my happiness for the week!

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[WuphonsReach]

SecureCRT is what I use as well. Extremely configurable and supports SSHv2. Well worth the (fairly) cheap price (not cheap, but not horribly expensive). It's also actively developed and they seem to be good about implementing security patches quickly.

One must-have feature for me is automatic logging of the session... nice to be able to go back and search for a particularly cryptic setting.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[Bert64]

Thats normal within a graphical interface, the local gui will bind keys for it's own use, and this they cant be sent to the remote app.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[pamar]

Except that "f1", for example, works fine, but there is no way (that I could find, at least) to emulate "f5". Or any "f" after "f4".

Other terminal emulators I used in the past were able to somehow make even obscure key combo work.

Apparently vt100 emulation in putty is more about the output than the input.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[Anonymous Coward]

I decided to use proggy clean (do a search on google), i find it the clearest and nicest to look at.

I doesn't have the full character set though, so no accented vocals.

Re:Where's PuTTY?

[kjs3]

Amen, brother. Lucida is easy on the eyes...

Whee.

[dasmegabyte]

Wow, look at all the different ways you can access a command line interface! My question is, where's the article on how to start fires with two sticks? Where's the article on different shapes for the wheel? And how about Domesticating the Dog in a Nutshell?

Seriously, I think it's really quite sad that the CLI is still around twenty years after the Macintosh showed it wasn't necessary. I think it's even more sad that MY Macintosh HAS a CLI. There is no reason why visual scripting has to be apocryphal, hard to write, and less powerful than piping text into other text using text switches on text files.

Re:Whee.

[Anonymous Coward]

Something being unnecessary is not the same thing as something being useless. I could turn around and say "seriously, I think it's really quite sad that Apple is still around twenty years after the PC showed it wasn't necessary". Different people like different things. Mellow out and let people make their own choices.

Re:Whee.

[Carewolf]

I guess you also think you can as good a news coverage by watching TV as you would reading a newspaper.

Re:Whee.

[linuxelf]

As the systems manager for a large metropolitan newspaper, I heartily thank you for your comment! Now if only more people believed as you do...

Re:Whee.

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, man, if only I had enough time to read the newspaper. That's the real problem: I have to spend most of my "free time" doing research for my job.

Re:I Love Terminal Emulators

[sparkywonderchicken]

I only use mine for side scrollers and ascii based games. I've always wanted to play Hunt the Wumpus 3d.

Re:Already??

[sxtxixtxcxh]

in soviet russia, servers slashdot YOU!

hahah i was kinda interested myself.

then again, i'm also at work, trying to get my productivity down to an all new low...

All of which are in violation of recent patents

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Patent 6,611,862: User station software that controls transport and presentation of content from a remote source

See Yesterday's Slashdot Story for more information.

Re:All of which are in violation of recent patents

[Greyfox]

My regime would force both the filer and the patent examiner to eat 1000 printed copies of that patent. Make up your mind to vote for me today!

gnome-terminal

[Chuck Bucket]

although I use Openbox fulltime now, I still use gnome-terminal for all of my CLI needs. It has all of the tweaking options that I use, plus it just looks the best (font-wise) out of all of the ones I've used. I do use rvxt when I'm on a low powered box though, but that's out of respect for the resources. so although I've been hacking in Linux since '95, I've used the same term for most of that time, and continue to this day.

CB

Re:gnome-terminal

[Greenisloved]

The terminal that comes with Gnome by default sucks !! it dint handle gracefully when i tried to background it with a none existent chic's pic by mistake.. And thats it , i couldnt use the terminal normally again.I did install gnome-multi-terminal thatw orked great , although its less attarctive.

Re:gnome-terminal

[Chuck Bucket]

uhhh...huh?

CB

Blue on black...

[mratitude]

Can I take this as an opportunity to take shots at the folks who insist on using that erie blue color on a black field in terminal windows? The characters blur and I suspect only 13 year old boys can focus them clearly.

Re:Blue on black...

[Marxist Hacker 42]

It may have been my TI-Writer influence (the first word processor I ever owned) but I still prefer white text on dark blue background for editors.

Re:Blue on black...

[zulux]

I suspect only 13 year old boys can focus them clearly.
..... fifteen seconds later....

Username: TouchMyWhiteGlove
Password: billiejean
Re-Enter Password: billiejean

Congratulations, TouchMyWhiteGlove, you're our newest Slashdot member.

Re:Blue on black...

[daveo0331]

I don't know about the blue text, but I definitely prefer black backgrounds on terminal emulators. It's easier on the eyes.

Re:Blue on black...

[fingon]

Actually, human eye has trouble focusing on blue color, and therefore using it for anything except decorative blobs is cruel to the user.

That's one of the basics of UI design, and STILL lots of terminal emulators have some asinine blue colored font themes, and color-ls has blue colors on some entries, grrr.

Re:Blue on black...

[iabervon]

That's why you need to set your blue color to something that's not all that blue. I like: XTerm*color4: DodgerBlue

There's nothing wrong with things being blue-tinted, even if you can't focus on the blue itself.

Re:Blue on black...

[Asterisk]

I never used TI-Writer, but messed around in BASIC a lot, so it's black-on-cyan for me.

Re:Blue on black...

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Ug- that was awfull- my eyes were always very tired after a long round of coding. Didn't matter in the long run though- I eventually wrote a program in Extended Basic that took a D/V 80 file and "compiled" it into extended basic tokens writing out to a D/V 128 file for use with the Merge command.

And I can't believe that I still remember those old TI 5.25" floppy formats.

I even wrote a set of programs you could call "early visual basic" for programming video games. It included character graphics generators, game logic and sprite generators, and a basic etch-a-sketch vector drawing screen. All of them output D/V 128 files for merge input into Extended Basic, and you had a neat video game when you were done.

Re:I Love Terminal Emulators

[linuxelf]

Oh no. I used to run Warcraft on my old VT220. It was all amber, and rendered in ASCII. And those sound effects, man, those were cool...

Secure CRT

[stryck9]

Though not mentioned, for those of us in the networking / windows world, one of the best, if not the best terminal emulator is SecureCRT from VanDyke software.

Re:Secure CRT

[digitalsushi]

i used to have a turkmenistan domain name, which ended with .tm (get it? the trademark domain! ha. oy. i was a dumb highschooler.) Anyways, my rdns pointed at the .tm address, and when I went to download the secureCRT package, with strong crypto, the website said to the effect of "Go home terrorist!" I had to update my DNS entry to download the darned software.

Re:Secure CRT

[talexb]

I have both ScureCRT and SecureFTP, and they are both high quality products. In particular I love SecureFTP because if the connection has timed out when you try to transfer something, it just makes the connection and transfers the file, rather than petulantly complaining (like WS_FTP) that the link is dead. Yeah. And?

Re:Secure CRT

[smitty45]

secureFTP, AFAIK, is ftp-over-SSL, and not SFTP, or SCP. WinSCP is better.

Re:TeraTerm c.f. PuTTY

[nick_urbanik]

Many people ask me whether or not TTSSH will support SSH protocol version 2. It does not and (unless someone else decides to try) it will not. Sorry, I don't have time to do it. Please don't ask me about it.

--from the TTSSH web site.

Is there anything TeraTerm Pro and TTSSH do that PuTTY doesn't do better?

Thanks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we can all laugh at you for being so clueless. You've sure put a bright spot on my day, Mr. Uberhacker!

Re:I Love Terminal Emulators

[DAldredge]

I REALLY miss the old /. where people knew what the hell they where talking about.

what the hell

[Trepidity]

I can't believe I've been using xterm for years and never knew it had menus...

Re:what the hell

[jarkko]

You should try the Tek4014 emulation in xterm.

It's so cool. I think gnuplot still supports old Tektronix terminals.

Re:what the hell

[joeljkp]

Yeah, it is pretty cool. I have reason to actually use Tek4014 emulation for some software we have here at work. I wish it was a more complete emulation though, like supported the graphics cursor and such. Then it'd be really useful.

MS Windows Terminal Emulators?

[ecliptik]

How about terminal emulators for MS Windows?

I know of puTTY, and use it all the time while at work on my Windows machine, but that's about all I've found.

Are there any other quality win32 terminal emulators?

Re:MS Windows Terminal Emulators?

[knarfling]

Two decent ones are NetTerm and TerraTerm. There are a lot of things that I like about NetTerm. My Favorite is the ability to have different keyboard layouts for each host you connect to. It includes multiple methods for connection as well.

NetTerm can be found here.

Never try to be funny on /. unless you have enough karma to withstand Mods with no sense of humor.

Re:MS Windows Terminal Emulators?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kermit 95.

Re:MS Windows Terminal Emulators?

[vasqzr]

HyperACCESS. HyperTerminal's big brother.

ProComm. Not just for BBS's anymore.

Feel free to search the web for more

Re:MS Windows Terminal Emulators?

[Detritus]

Try Kermit 95 from Columbia University. It has the all the bells and whistles, and the kitchen sink.

Re:MS Windows Terminal Emulators?

[dar]

RXVT in the Cygwin collection. Even has background pixmaps.

The DOS box never looked so good.

Re:MS Windows Terminal Emulators?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ruud Beerstra's IVT. It's not perfect, but it's the most ergonomic one I've found in 10 years.
It runs in a DOS mode window, so (1) it's fast, (2) no toolbars, or other stupid windows accroutments, (3) none of those dodgy windows fixed width fonts.

The one thing I can't stand is editing code in the normal 24*80 view, it's like looking through blinkers. With this I can get a couple of 81*80 windows side by side for maximum uber coding efficiency.

term v. shell

[Anonymous Coward]

i've been using linux for a little bit and i haven't been able to figure out the difference between a shell and a terminal.

can anyone help me out?

Re:term v. shell

[Anonymous Coward]

A terminal is a piece of hardware that translates (usually) signals on a serial cable into pretty letters on a screen. It also takes keyboard strokes and translates them back to signals on the serial cable. A terminal emulator is a piece of software that translates "signals" into pretty letters on your screen. e.g., an old piece of hardware called the VT100 may have interpreted ^[[01m to mean "switch to the bold font" (I'm doing this from memory). Thus, a VT100 emulator, when it reads those 5 characters, will switch to using a bold font, and so on.

A shell (well, an interactive shell) needs a terminal to work. The shell's job is to read in commands and execute. e.g., user presses ^A, the terminal emulator emulates sending out some signals along its virtual "serial cable" saying "dude, he pressed ^A". Shell thinks for a while and says "okay terminal, move the cursor to the beginning of the line" and so on.

The terminal (and hence the terminal emulator) is a bridge between real-world I/O devices (keyboard, pretty letters on the screen) and whatever software happens to be running (often a shell, but not always). The shell is a bridge between the terminal and the operating system. Calling system calls by hand is quite inconvenient, so the shell allows you to type in commands (via the terminal) in some intuitive form and then translates them into system calls.

Of course you can probably guess that you don't even need a shell at all to use a terminal or terminal emulator. You could set it so that when your terminal emulator starts up it launches, say, lynx, instead of bash. Lynx communicates with the terminal (interpreting key strokes, sending back screen-update commands) in much the same way that a shell does.

Re:term v. shell

[zeath]

Of course you can probably guess that you don't even need a shell at all to use a terminal or terminal emulator. You could set it so that when your terminal emulator starts up it launches, say, lynx, instead of bash.

Or there's always the good ol' "screen -dRR" when a session is initiated, thus adding another bridge to your metaphor.

number one feature for me: Xdefaults

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it built on Xt? If I can't change EVERYTHING about it with ~/.Xdefaults, it's more trouble than it's worth. Bonus points if it supports the editres protocol.

Re:Secure CRT c.f. PuTTY

[nick_urbanik]

Compared with PuTTY: downside: Not free, so I have no experience with it. But I'm interested: what are the upsides?

SecureCRT from vandyke.com is my fav.

[qualico]

I prefer SecureCRT for my emulation.
http://www.vandyke.com/products/index. html

Excellent product with scripting, keymapping, tons of choice emulation and transfer protocols.

Otherwise, a Wyse60 was my weapon of choice in the good ol days.

Real nerds don't use terminal emulators

[mark-t]

Real nerds actually have these sorts of terminals lying around!

Who needs emulation when you can have the real thing?

(my wife has, on more than one occasion, insisted that I ditch my vt220, but I can't bring myself to just chuck the thing... too many memories)

Re:Real nerds don't use terminal emulators

[daeley]

my wife has, on more than one occasion, insisted that I ditch my vt220, but I can't bring myself to just chuck the thing... too many memories

You really shouldn't talk about your wife that way. ;)

Re:Real nerds don't use terminal emulators

[mark-t]

Ah... someone picked up on my double meaning. :)

Re:Real nerds don't use terminal emulators

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it.

Re:Real nerds don't use terminal emulators

[hurfy]

Of course, BUT........... Nothing is too happy to hook to my Wang 2350 terminal except the old Wang :) Well, that and it requires a small nuclear plant to power the crt :( a real nerd uses 2000 watts and 600 lbs of equipment to play battleship ;)

Free as in Beer?

[thedillybar]

Linux Weekly News has a now free review...

Free as in beer? or free as in slashdotted?

Re:I Love Terminal Emulators

[jarkko]

Slashdot used to be a lot better. Five or six years ago you had your annoying trolls but also some bright sparks of insight.

These days slashdot is worse than a pack of mediocre newbies.

Hell, back then even newbies were smarter than the current newbies. It's like slashdot has become an eternal amateur hour with ignorant fools getting moderated to +5 insightful by honest-to-God-reaaaallly-stupid-moderators.

I give up.

Perhaps now's a good time to ask...

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the difference between a "linux console session" and a "shell session"? Konsole loudly advertises its ability to use these different types of terminals.

multi-gnome-terminal

[NetMasta10bt]

People you need to check out Multi-Gnome-Terminal.

It supports everything that Gnome-Term does but has much better tab support (including moving tabs). Better shortcut key management. Allows splitting a terminal horizontally and or vertically within a tab. Has terminal "bonding" allowing typing the same thing in multiple windows. Supports background images with brightness contrast/tinting/gamma like Eterm, but configurable graphically.

Only thing is it hasn't been binary pkgs haven't been rereleased for current distros... but the old packages work pretty well!

Give it a try.. you'll like it!

Re:multi-gnome-terminal

[forevermore]

Only thing is it hasn't been binary pkgs haven't been rereleased for current distros

Actually, dag's repository has rpm's for current redhat-based distros. Works great in fc1 and fc2, except that multi-gnome-terminal isn't gtk2-friendly so the colors are all off (I need to backport my theme to the older gtk).

Re:multi-gnome-terminal

[twener]

And does it have a GNOME 2 version? From the webpage it's seems to be a rather dead project.

Universal Constant

[Phoenixhunter]

The grass is always greener yesterday. There are simply more people now who post on Slashdot...so there are more Funny moderations than Insightful/Interesting. However I'd be willing to bet that there are a far greater number of individuals who are better informed and make better decisions by reading Slashdot.

Re:Universal Constant

[Anonymous Coward]

And the truth gets modded as "troll"... nice...

Re:Universal Constant

[bersl2]

However I'd be willing to bet that there are a far greater number of individuals who are better informed and make better decisions by reading Slashdot.

Before Slashdot, I was a Windows-using "power" luser. Now I actually know things about computers! And in only 18 months! Thanks for making my life better, Slashdot! [absolutely true story]

But seriously, the other thing Slashdot does is tell me how I'm getting fucked in the ass next. I had no idea just how much businesses and governments are scum.

Re:Universal Constant

[Anonymous Coward]

No, seriously. The people who are still in junior high (like you) are utterly clueless and drag us all down. Go back five years, and the idiotically wrong posts simply did not get modded up to 5, ie, high enough to be seen by those who filter out the dross.

should the terminal emulator be revisited?

[CoughDropAddict]

I don't know much about terminal emulation, so this is a pretty uninformed opinion, but...

It seems like the world could benefit from seeing a new terminal emulation standard, based on the reality that terminal emulation is almost never dealing with hardware terminals any more.

Specifically, it would be nice to see:

- the ability to set colors arbitrarily based on RGB pairs
- the delete/backspace thing sorted out. It drives me crazy when I have a host/server/software combination where backspace doesn't work correctly, which unfortunately happens pretty often
- a single, standardized set of codes so that terminfo/termcap are no longer necessary
- the ability to receive mouse clicks

Again, I don't know much about this area, I just speak as a user who's wasted too much time with the current state of terminal emulation. And while I recognize that there's a lot of legacy hardware/software out there, I'm pretty sure that you could put compatability measures in place.

Re:should the terminal emulator be revisited?

[CoughDropAddict]

Another idea: scrollback control, so that the scrollbar/scrollback for 'screen' could work correctly (as if you weren't using screen).

Re:should the terminal emulator be revisited?

[iantri]

Well, I was never much able to make heads or tails of the backspace/del thing and the terminfo and termcap databases.

As for mouseclicks, this shouldn't be a problem; the xterm terminal type has support for this -- set your terminal to "xterm" type and load up an app with support (say, the "links" web browser) and see what happens. On the console, gpm does mouse support -- damned if I know how it works. The whole system for terminal emulation is seriously fucked up under *nix.

Re:should the terminal emulator be revisited?

[cjpez]

In case you didn't know, you can fix the backspace thing with:

stty erase <ctrl-v><backspace>

That'll set your backspace to how you want it...

Re:should the terminal emulator be revisited?

[CoughDropAddict]

Thanks. Why does that work? Does CTRL-V "quote" the next character?

Re:should the terminal emulator be revisited?

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Oooh, that's hot. Imagine it... a screen-aware terminal emulator. It could have seperate tabs for each screen, and even hold seperate scrollback buffers for each one so it didn't have to re-transfer the information each time. If this isn't written in a year or two, when I have time, I'll get to work on it.

Re:should the terminal emulator be revisited?

[Wise Dragon]

That's something I've wanted too. I'd also like to see a terminal that could do tabs that were actually 'screen' screens. With titles.

Re:should the terminal emulator be revisited?

[cjpez]

Yeah, it ctrl-v and then any key and you'll insert the character itself instead of interpreting it. will give the the enter char, so you can use it in regexps or whatever.

Not that I wouldn't mind never having to do the stty command again, but at least it works.

Re:should the terminal emulator be revisited?

[spitzak]

The delete/backspace thing is best fixed by having Unix machines treat *both* as backspace, so it does not matter which your terminal sends. Why this has not been fixed in Unix about 20 years ago is a mystery...

The VT100 codes are pretty "standard" and all terminal emulators use them, thus terminfo/termcap can pretty much be ignored. I have much more problems with programs that try to use termcap/terminfo than with programs that just assumme a VT100.

There is some standard from xterm so that mouse clicks send escape sequences, so a program that wants them can turn them on.

Re:should the terminal emulator be revisited?

[Anonymous Coward]

The xterm "mouse support" kinda sucks. It's not as good as, say, gpm.

Speaking of GPM... I happen to think it's a wonderful program. You can even use libgpm in your console applications to give them full mouse support. I once wrote a curses application that had windows like a GUI. It used libgpm, and you could move the windows around, close them, size them, click menus, etc.

libgpm also tries to support xterm, but it doesn't work as well as it did in the console, because xterm doesn't report very detailed mouse events.

Re:should the terminal emulator be revisited?

[multipartmixed]

Note that the control-V thing only applies to shells built around GNU readline (e.g. BASH)

Re:should the terminal emulator be revisited?

[multipartmixed]

> Why this has not been fixed in Unix about 20 years ago is a mystery...

Because that would break help in emacs (^H).

Re:should the terminal emulator be revisited?

[Capybara]

We're annoying everyone just so we can preserve a bad choice for a help key? Move it to F1 or something and we can finally fix backspace.

Re:should the terminal emulator be revisited?

[spitzak]

It would not even break emacs! Emacs puts the terminal in raw mode and thus it might need to be fixed seperately, but a change to the tty driver would make this work for all your command-line programs.

Re:should the terminal emulator be revisited?

[Anonymous Coward]

That would fix Backspace, but then Delete would be broken. Sure backspace is more important, but both are useful. Treating them the same is not a solution.

Maybe it is the best we can hope for though. I have found that so many years of brokenness has gotten me in the habit of using ctrl-d instead of delete in shells and even in emacs, even though every program and terminal I use currently works correctly with both keys.

Re:should the terminal emulator be revisited?

[spitzak]

All modern terminals and terminal emulators send something other than 127 for the Delete key, mine for instance sends ^[[3~. Therefore the behavior for this key is unchanged. The codes 127 and ^H are only sent by the key in the upper-right of the main keyboard that is usually marked "backspace", therefore both those codes should do backspace.

Re:TeraTerm c.f. PuTTY

[technothrasher]

Is there anything TeraTerm Pro and TTSSH do that PuTTY doesn't do better?

Serial port connections...

Goodwin?

[ttfkam]

I think using the term "Netzis" qualifies for Goodwin's Law.

Why not use the real thing?

[TheSource]

Why would you use an emulator when you can have the real thing?

Re:Why not use the real thing?

[bungley]

I was using a wyse 75 just today. Green and black screen, keyboard which beeps when you type (I thought they only did that in the movies!), and the fear that using it will break something (shutting the thing off at the wrong time drops machines to prom, which is subtle enough to cause an annoying amount of downtime)

Yep, the retro charm of these things outweighs a software emulator any day :)

Re:Why not use the real thing?

[L0stm4n]

Why would you use an emulator when you can have the real thing?

Because I cant play this in those terminals!

Re:Why not use the real thing?

[chegosaurus]

Good point, but I'll need a 500 mile long serial cable.

Key Mapping

[knarfling]

One of the troubles with terminal emulators is the lack of ability to custom map function keys. We have an old HP Unix system and some software that looks for a specific escape sequence when a function key is pressed.

In Windows, NetTerm allows me to load a custom keymap file. I can connect to one system with one keymap, and connect to a completely different one with a different keyboard map. I have yet to find anything like that in Linux.

I have been able to edit the Xdefaults file to change the keymap for Xterm, but it is always the same keymap no matter who I connect to.

Re:Key Mapping

[Anonymous Coward]

try xmodmaprc, i've used it to set my caps lock to control (and lots of other stuff)

Re:I Love Terminal Emulators

[proj_2501]

" Slashdot used to be a lot better. Five or six years ago you had your annoying trolls but also some bright sparks of insight.

These days slashdot is worse than a pack of mediocre newbies."

Does that explain why you are still here and posting?

aterm

[ChristTrekker]

Based on rxvt, light-weight, with additional features. I'm glad the article at least mentioned it. Why is anyone still using xterm? Do you really need Tektronix emulation? But with all the computational resources of the typical PC these days, the difference between xterm and aterm seems increasingly small.

Best feature in konsole for the sys admin

[ballwall]

"Send input to all sessions"

Installing a fixpack? Open a tab for each server, set one to send input to all sessions and you only have to do everything once. Enables you to not have to write a script when you don't have to.

Probably a function that only a small niche will use, but when you have a reason it saves a ton of work.

Re:TeraTerm c.f. PuTTY

[reboots]

TeraTerm stores its settings in an external file (teraterm.ini), which can be quickly modified and eases large-scale deployment of your preferred configuration.

PuTTY stores all settings in the Windows registry; a deliberate (and, in some ways, reasonable) design decision that makes distribution of a pre-configured client a little more difficult. (There is a semi-hack way of doing this in the PuTTY docs.)

PuTTY seems to have better emulation defaults, and I prefer it for personal use.

what do you use on OS X?

[ChristTrekker]

What terminal emulators are you using on OS X? I find Terminal somewhat...lacking. I especially would like a ssh client, like Tectia (formerly SSH Secure Shell) for Windows, because establishing multiple ssh connections in multiple Terminals to the slower boxes on my LAN is a pain. Additional connections with Tectia are virtually instantaneous once the first one is authenticated.

Re:what do you use on OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

iTerm

Re:what do you use on OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

GLterm

Re:what do you use on OS X?

[bruceg]

PowerTerm

mlterm is great for UTF-8, what else ?

[theefer]

I use mlterm because of its great support of UTF-8 rendering. It seems to feature all the cool features from Eterm as well, but I noticed that sometimes, when a lot of text is scrolling fast, the terminal seems to lag a bit.

Does anyone know of another *term with good UTF-8 support (which is not the case of Eterm, alas) ?

Re:Secure CRT c.f. PuTTY

[swb]

A lot of good VT emulation variants (ANSI, Linux, SCOANSI, VT100, VT102, VT220), as well as ANSI color, very customizable in terms of keyboard (include an Emacs mode), ASCII/Zmodem sending, scripting, SSH1/2 (several standards supported), Telnet, TAPI and COM port mode.

It's worth the money; my version from '99 still runs fine under XP.

Have you tried Secure NetTerm?

[knarfling]

Seems to have many of the same features and is shareware. You can pay $69.95 to get rid of the annoying popup box when you exit, but you can run it for free.

Re:I Love Terminal Emulators

[BK425]

That's right sonny!
Why, back in the old days we'd truge off to a LUG meeting with our model100 tucked under our arm and it would up hill -both- -ways-! Why? Because we wouldn'ta been caught -dead- trudging with one them damn new fangled osborn things. Transportable? What the heck is that?? I got boat anchors that got more portable that that thing and if you dropped it in the snow it'd crash down through the accumulation and you'd be able to load 3 programs (count 'em; THREE) before you'd ever dig that boat anchor out. That's right, it's URLII and a good tape subsystem fer me sonny! Why back in the old days ...

Gnome-Terminal would be perfect, but

[Plug]

If you run something like irssi in screen, and then open a second tab in the window, you will have the first window turn entirely blank-on-blue background.

These two bugs refer to this problem. Apparently setting TERM=vt102 helps, but this problem keeps g-t from being the 'perfect' terminal emulator for the GNOME desktop (it means at least one person I know uses konsole on gnome.)

Re:Gnome-Terminal would be perfect, but

[ivan256]

When they added tab support to Gnome Terminal, they removed the "Reset" command from the right click menu. It *used* to be perfect when it was light-weight, tab-free, easily configurable, and (most-importantly) fully usable without the menubar. Now it's more bloated and less functional. It sucks having to turn on the menubar to reset the terminal if it gets messed up and the application running in the terminal isn't a shell...

And what the hell does anybody need tabs for? We have multiple desktops and multiple windows. How many different paradigms of screen space virtualization do we need at one time?

Grr.

Re:Gnome-Terminal would be perfect, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it not possible to define a shortcut for "Reset" action?

Re:Gnome-Terminal would be perfect, but

[Plug]

I like tabs. Tabs make sense. You have one 'terminal emulator' program which holds together multiple instances of its usage. I use them in my browser, I like being able to use them in my terminal too.

Would it be fine again if they put the reset back?

Re:Gnome-Terminal would be perfect, but

[ivan256]

Would it be fine again if they put the reset back?

Yup.

I don't mind the tabs because you can turn them off. I just don't understand liking them, is all.

Re:Gnome-Terminal would be perfect, but

[Teancom]

My desktop is layed out with four virtual desktops. #1 for web-browsing with two copies of konqueror, one for documentation of project(s) I'm working on, the other for normal surfing, both with multiple tabs. #2 for my terminal (konsole) full-screened using multiple tabs. shift-[left|right]arrow makes speeding around the various tabs quick and painless. #3 for email, that is, kmail and korganizer (I tried Kontact, it crashed on me once and that was it, back to kmail). #4 is for "other". If I open any other gui app than konq, konsole, or kmail, (that would be a once a week occurence at most) it goes on that desktop. The only time I have to touch the mouse is on desktop #1, and even then only to click links (alt-o to focus on url-bar and highlight, j and k or spacebar to scroll). Every app is full-screened, using all the desktop real-estate my 21" monitor has to offer, and I spend the absolute minimum amount of time screwing around with playing "find the window" or "place the window just right".

Hopefully this helps explain why some people like tabs in their terminals. It fits very well with the (warning, stupid word coming up) paradigm I use all throughout my desktop.

Re:Gnome-Terminal would be perfect, but

[Anonymous Coward]

gnome-terminal seems to lack the ability to configure a default size for new terminal windows. At least I haven't been able to find it in any version I've used.

That, IMO, is a serious flaw.

Why GNUStep Terminal.app is my choice

[WWWWolf]

Some pathetic rambling follows...

I've used a lot of different terminal emulators, and these days, I use three different ones. I have one big xterm on one desktop with root shell on it, I sometimes use eterm for random things, I just figured out MU*ing with tinyfugue might be actually fun with some special color tweaks for xterm...

...but for actually using stuff, I have GNUStep Terminal.app.

It's not a perfect terminal, of course. Font configuration is pain and there's no quick choices, paint/middle copying of stuff doesn't always work as intended (explicit pasting works fine though), and its performance went to hell when GNUStep decided to add l33t freetype anti-aliasing mumbojumbo. Not to even mention that GNUstep has weird ideas like "don't care what the window manager says, focus means front!"

But there are many good things in Terminal.app. One of the nicest things in it is the New Terminal command, Alt+N. Most other terminal emulators don't seem to have keyboard shortcut for that. There's a real scrollbar - I know xterm fans will probably flame me for that, but xaw scrollbars just don't work practically, no matter how excellent they are in theory =)

Yeah, I know, it's a silly reason to like a terminal emulator. But a small trick like that actually does make a great difference in usability.

A perfect terminal emulator would have flawless text rendering and terminal emulation (Terminal.app is perfect, if a bit slow at the moment), user-definable, per-window font choices in context menu, and preferrably the key shortcut for new terminal (I don't want to go through window manager to start up another terminal).

The GNOME terminal in comparision isn't something I really like - I wonder if they've finally fixed the mysterious garbling I first saw in very early releases? The GNOME and KDE terminals also have tabs, which are not fun - web pages are screen hogs, but that's not exactly a problem with multiple terminals with small font!

Re:Why GNUStep Terminal.app is my choice

[Anonymous Coward]

>One of the nicest things in it is the New
>Terminal command, Alt+N. Most other terminal
>emulators don't seem to have keyboard shortcut
>for that.
Ctrl+Shift+N on GNOME Terminal.

>There's a real scrollbar - I know xterm fans
>will probably flame me for that, but xaw
>scrollbars just don't work practically, no
>matter how excellent they are in theory =)
See above.

>A perfect terminal emulator would have flawless
>text rendering and terminal emulation
>(Terminal.app is perfect, if a bit slow at the
>moment),
XFT in GNONE.

>user-definable, per-window font choices in
>context menu, and preferrably the key shortcut
>for new terminal (I don't want to go through
>window manager to start up another terminal).
Multiple profiles in GNOME. Right click for context menu, see above for the shortcut.

>The GNOME terminal in comparision isn't >something I really like - I wonder if they've
>finally fixed the mysterious garbling I first
>saw in very early releases? The GNOME and KDE
>terminals also have tabs, which are not fun -
>web pages are screen hogs, but that's not
>exactly a problem with multiple terminals with
>small font!
Yes they fixed that.

Re:TeraTerm c.f. PuTTY

[Anonymous Coward]

cutting and pasting SUCK in putty... however it is the best windows FREE ssh v2.0 client

Claim 1

[Alexis de Torquemada]

A software product for use at a user station, the user station including a processor and a storage device, the software product comprising computer executable instructions that, when executed by the processor: enable a user at the user station to select content from each of a plurality of independent publishers; effect transport of the selected content from each of the plurality of publishers to the user station over a communications network in accordance with an object manifest, the object manifest including an identification of the selected content, and a source address for each of the respective publishers; and effect presentation of the selected content to the user at the user station with a user interface that is customized to the respective publishers.

Filed on April 20, 2000; 71 more egregiously broad claims to follow. This is sick.

Re:Claim 1

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Looks like either a browser or a terminal emulator to me all right- after all, an address can be either a phone number or a URL or an IP address, it really doesn't matter. Definately claim 1 covers all of the above.

Re:I Love Terminal Emulators

[Maudib]

Yeah, and no one ever bitched about the comments 4 or 5years ago.

I remember a time on slashdot when no one complained about the quality of comments. Then I woke up.

Time to go shopping.

[numbski]

*Looks at the K-Mart ad*

Hey look! Boys underwear, half off! w00t!

Eterm

[ajutla]

I haven't read the article since it now appears Slashdottted, but, if anyone cares, personally I really like Eterm. It's lightweight, fast, and also quite pretty--it has a lot of nifty background images built in and it allows for pseudo-transparency. Very customizable, too. I use it on my desktop Linux machine all the time.

How about actual terminal firmware VMs?

[swb]

Instead of writing software that's supposed to follow the commands for the various flavors of terminal, why not instead an actual emulator that lets you run those terminals firmware? Even really good emulation software doesn't always get emulation just right, leading to annoying display glitches, or only arbitrary functions are supported leaving much of the original terminal's functionality out.

IIRC the VT100 was based on the 8080 CPU; why not apply the same techniques that MAME uses -- download the firmware and run the firmware in an emulator or VM and actually be using the terminal itself? Some of the on-screen functionality would have to be simulated due to the PC's lack of corresponding text modes and fonts, but that's what a GUI is for anyway, and similar to what game emulators due to account for the lack of specific hardware devices the original games had.

I'd imagine that the legal problems with this would be even less than the arcade people face, since the code inside those terminals isn't really worth any money to anyone.

Re:How about actual terminal firmware VMs?

[3gm]

I built an ADM-3A years ago; it had no firmware; no cpu. All basic TTL logic chips except for the UART.

Re:How about actual terminal firmware VMs?

[freeze128]

An interesting idea. However, it might limit you a little more. Say you wanted to COPY and PASTE some text from your emulated screen. That type of emulator may not have support for it (since the actual terminal had no support for it).
It might also limit you in the accessability department, with access to Text-to-Speech converters and magnifiers.

Re:How about actual terminal firmware VMs?

[swb]

You're right that just running the VT100 firmware wouldn't be any more useful than say, a VT100 itself.

I'd guess I'm imagining that the VM would naturally have to act as something of a UI/wrapper for the emulation session, if anything to map the IO from the PC hardware to the terminal's virtual hardware.

This layer could also allow for some of the more expected terminal emulation features, like session text capture, network functionality (telnet/ssh), window management, keyboard mapping, modem control, cut/paste, and so on.

The 'core' would be the actual terminal firmware, providing otherwise 100% perfect emulation, since it wouldn't be emulating a VT100, it WOULD be a VT100.

xterm/rxvt bugs

[Kent Recal]

With whatever terminal I use I occassionally stumble into resizing issues where not all available area is used until I resize again (or run "resize" or something).

Does anyone know why that crap has *still* not been fixed or is just my distro to blame?

Another criteria

[Schlaegel]

Does it support using the mouse like a VT does?

Some do. Some don't. gnome-terminal doesn't, but I wish it did.

A lot of the console web browsers, mc, and suse's yast make good use of a mouse.

SSH Client for Workstations

[tyrr]

Check it out
It is "Feature-limited version for evaluation, non-commercial and educational use. No license file required."
All the features of SecureCRT at no cost.

Re:I Love Terminal Emulators

[whiteranger99x]

Cool, how many CPS (characters per second) did you playing WC2 on your terminal? :)

Re:I Love Terminal Emulators

[linuxelf]

Oh, all of them!

coincidence

[Apreche]

I am a big fan of xterm. But I also use aterm for some of its added features like transparency and such. The only thing my terminals are missing is tabs. I often quickly fill my screen real estate with too many terms. I tried to emerge multi-aterm but this project is at version .1 and doesn't even support things like the home and end keys. I know about screen, but that is not quite what I'm after. I would like to have my terminals to have tabs the way the ion window manager has tabs. That would be super cool. I don't want to actually use ion though, I'm an xfce4 man right now with no plans to change especially with the new stuff coming soon.

Re:coincidence

[wjeff]

I am still very much an rxvt fan, but I also wanted tabs. I recently switched from blackbox wm to fluxbox wm, which allows you to tab all your windows, to get tabbed terminal windows not to mention all the other improvements. I just can't bring myself to run gnome or kde given their enormous footprints. The only thing I miss is displaying icons on the desktop.

Re:coincidence

[leoxx]

Fluxbox is theoretically a good solution, but I found it had a lot of bugs the last time I tried it (probably over a year ago). Has it gotten any better recently?

Re:coincidence

[Anonymous Coward]

screen is your friend, if you are bothering to use a CLI why use graphical tabs?

What about OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've found iTerm to be crappy, and the default terminal emulator isn't much better. GLTerm seems to be pretty nice, and it's fast as hell (uses OpenGL to draw the text) but it's not free, and prone to its own set of quirks.

PuTTY has been my favorite of all term emulators on all platforms, but as I move away from Windows toward OS X, it's no longer a reasonable option.

This main sound od but....

[MSDos-486]

I belive its possile to emulate hardware by software . A program could act as sort of a "virtual term" in that it uses the same switchings, I/O routines and logic functions as the orginal, thats how some older analog game systems are emulated

nothing beats the linux console + screen + fbset

[fishbowl]

Unfortunately, framebuffer support has been broken on the hardware where I need it the most, for a long, long time. Namely, the Radeon 8500LE, the Nforce2 onboard chip of the Shuttle XPC SN1G2, and the Trident Cyberblade/A1 on my Toshiba laptop.

Framebuffer consoles don't work on *any* of these boards. Fortunately, I guess, vesafb (not tridentfb) works on my Toshiba. But this brokenness has stopped me from upgrading from 2.4 to 2.6. I've decided that it isn't ever going to be fixed, and that 2.4 is the end of the line for the linux kernel for my application, which happens to be the terminal environment in the console framebuffer.

Powerterm by Ericom Software!

[bruceg]

I use Powerterm on Windows, OSX, and Linux! In fact, I cannot live without it. It does keymapping, which is very useful for my application, and emulates a wide variety of systems. I was tired of messing with termcap files, and Powerterm just plain works. It does SSH, telnet (if you are brave enough), and I use it on my laptop through the modem.

It also does on the fly switching to 132 column mode, for those wide reports that you output to your screen, and a history buffer up to 5MB. Along with a print screen feature, and script recording, it does everything I need it to do, when at the CLI of any host.

Have a look: http://www.ericom.com/pti4linux.asp

I'm writing my own...

[ciggieposeur]

For those who REALLY like the command line, here's another terminal emulator that works straight off the raw Linux console: Qodem. Check the README and screenshots page to understand a little why I felt compelled to clone a DOS-based BBS-era program. :)

Currently on the blurry alpha/pre-alpha stage, but another six months and it'll be pretty cool.

For the full version, yes

[ttfkam]

Mindterm Lite comes in much smaller than the full version. Just download the source code from their site a build with the "lite" target. Remember, it doesn't need to have all of the bells and whistles of a standalone SSH client. All you need are the portion(s), the cipher(s), and the mode(s) that are necessary to talk to that one server.

Re:TeraTerm c.f. PuTTY

[Bombcar]

The only annoyance with PuTTY is that you have to change SSH keys into its format.

TTSSH doesn't require that. But then again, it is worth the conversion

Most comments are wrong I think

[Peter Lustig]

I think it was more meant in the way of VT220 or IBM TN3270 emulation, not terminals that just open a shell.

By the way, @work we use Hoblink J-Term for our Host Connection. The decision for this product was made after reading that it was written in Java, and would therefore run on different platforms. They nowhere wrote that they used MS-Java, so it just runs with IE and the (quite buggy) MS Java Engine. Seems clearer if you look at their homepage and find this picture. Quite annoying.

Just my 2c

MIA: decent ansi char support

[Count of Montecristo]

Maybe i'm an idiot for not having figured it out yet, but i still need to access a couple of legacy applications (mainly accounting and inventory control) that were written for ANSI, SCOANSI and Televideo 955 (tvi955) terminals..

None of the above so called 'terminal emulators' is capable of 'emulating' a decent ansi-graphics screen with the default configuration because of all the unicode stuff floating around in linux, and I just can't select the font that will do it for mi.

that sucks big time when i could replace about 50 old Televideos with shiny new inexpensive linux machines, and provide my users with a lot of extra goodies than their terminals will allow.. but alas, can't use Linux because of the lack of 'emulation'. you are stuck with vt100, and unicode at that..

and 'rewrite your app to support unicode' is not an option for me.. :( I have yet to find an emulator that will allow me to do ansi-graphics out of the box.

missing option

[Tumbleweed]

What, no C-Kermit? Geez.

Re:TeraTerm c.f. PuTTY

[Qzukk]

Cutting and pasting emulates an xterm. Or you can change the setting to make it emulate the cut and paste in fast edit mode in a DOS box.

Either way, it makes it easy to use without a keyboard. (after all, how the hell are you supposed to stop your program when ctrl-c is cutting? :P)

Terminals with URL recognition?

[tuxdude]

I run mutt on rxvt. I am interested to know if there are any terminals that allow me to click on URL(in the terminal, in this case in mutt) and open them in my browser. This is really useful when somebody sends a mail with lot of links(like debian weekly news).

Re:Terminals with URL recognition?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't used gnome in a long time, but I think I remember gnome-terminal being able to do that circa 1998...

Not sure though ...

Re:Terminals with URL recognition?

[MrBouncy]

You really want more than just URL recognition, though I'll concede that URL's get the most attention from my right-button-reflex..

Many moons ago, OctobrX was complaining about having a hard time getting something called "dingus" rxvt compiled for his system, so he could right click on url's .. I took a stab at it and was able to get him going, and then I decided to check it out for myself and see if it was just superfluous fluff or actually something cool..

the basic way it works is to use regex patterns for what to highlight, and then you can fine-tune from there with what color gets used, which click actually performs an action (possibly with a modifier key), and a shell command to run, either in the background or redirecting its output back to the running terminal. (there are a few other details I've glossed over since the implementation has fallen by the wayside)

within minutes I was pretty much hooked, after a few weeks/months went by of using it I could no longer handle a "dead" terminal interface for more than a few minutes, and since then I've been locally porting up the changes from the original into newer debian rxvt sources as they come out.

nowadays I've been feeling the pain of no UTF8 support in rxvt and periodically go scanning around for a new standard xterm replacement, but nothing I've come across yet has satisfied.

I might even give up the "active-tags" style functionality for an xterm replacement that sports decent speed, utf8, and allows for arbitrary key rebinding with X resources or somesuch, but that day has not yet come for me..

if you wanna learn more about what I described above just do some google-digging for "dingus", "active-tags", and maybe toss in Nat Friedman's name, I'm sure there's still references out there.

You missed the coolest part of Eterm

[sproket]

The newest eterm's have experimental screen support. It allows you to use something like tabs, where each one is a new window in a single screen session making it by far the coolest terminal. Experimental means it has a tendency to crash occasionally, but you don't lose your work because screen is still running, so you just have to restart eterm.

Yes it does

[Craig Davison]

At least, gnome-terminal 2.6.0 does here on my FC 2 box.

RXVT FOREVER

[Marrow]

And damn them for taking it out too.

XMLTerm, can't revisit much more than that!:-)

[refactored]

http://xmlterm.sourceforge.net/ About XMLterm XMLterm is both a command line "terminal", like an Xterm, and also a web page, like the one displayed by your browser. XMLterm adds powerful hypertext and graphical capabilities to the Xterm-like terminal interface through its use of the extensible markup language (XML), which is a generic specification for markup languages like HTML. XMLterm is implemented using the open source Mozilla browser components.

Re:XMLTerm, can't revisit much more than that!:-)

[GamerGeek]

While this is really cool, it doesn't look like it's active. Things like this though always make me wonder. Why do we layer so much complexity on top of HTTP to create dynamic web applications when what we really want is a statefull protocol like telnet or ssh? Think about it, session management, cookies, servelts, all systems for recording user interaction and determining what they want next, based on what they wanted in the past. How about a terminal that used a full a HTML or even better XUL renderer? Then you could write cross platform "rich client" applications without having to worry about how to fill one combobox based on the current value of another combobox without rerendering the entire page, or silly things like that. You would never have to worry about people hitting the "back" button, or messing with the url to change their post data, or session expiration. I could be wrong, but it seems sometimes web applications are a square peg round hole type problem.

EWAN!

[Mr. Neutron]

Ewan telnet ruled! How come it isn't reviewed?

Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Linux was meant to be a terminal emulator, that it hasn't been mentioned baffles me...

Because I would have to *gasp* use a serial port

[Marrow]

I loathe serial

What about actually emulating terminals

[Churchill]

These are fine for accessing a linux command line, but what about actual terminal emulation? Nothing easy on linux. I love SecureCRT on the windows side for linux & vt100 emulation, but it's options for other terminals are few. What does a good job emulating of TN3270, 5250 & HP terminals?

Re:What about actually emulating terminals

[Foolhardy]

Mochasoft has cross-platform terminal emulators for TN5250, TN3270, TN3812 (a printer), LPD and SSH. They aren't free, but not too expensive either (for the TN5250 $25 USD single or $250 company) and worth it.

I still use xterm and love it

[QuoteMstr]

I'm still using xterm. Why?

* 256 color support: xterm gives you a customizable color cube if you enable it. With applications that support it, this mode can produce fantastic results.

* memory use: xterm, heavyweight? With the tektronix stuff stripped out, xterm is actually pretty light. It starts quickly and doesn't connect to a sound server or load a million shared libraries

* kickass font support: xterm? modern font support? Yep. Modern versions of xterm support Xft2, which allows you to use all the modern font processing tricks fontconfig offers, as well as antialiasing. Even without Xft, though, xterm has excellent unicode support. It passes UTF-8-demo.txt and UTF-8-test.txt with flying colors.

* simple UI: xterm gives the user a box that represents a terminal. There are no menus, no tab bars, no garish scrollbars, nothing except the actual terminal, a removable scrollbar, and the window decorations. xterm's menus are probably its worst features: they're ugly and primitive. But they work, and you seldom have to use them.

I'm sure other terminal emulators are good too, but I'm sticking with xterm.

what i'd like to see in a terminal emulator

[trb]

wish list:

• support for variable width fonts. this would require some finessing tabs, and perhaps an easy way to switch to a fixed width font. while you're at it, support unicode and other fat fonts.
• ability to search for text (with a regexp, of course) in the output window.

I think plan 9 has these, but I use unix/linux, and acme / wily don't cut it for me as handy *nix ui's. They seem wonderful in theory, but I could never get wily working on my *nix boxes in practice.

Changing default colors in xterm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know how to change that damn blue color that is, among other things, used for subsections in man pages and the --INSERT-- in vim? I've tried changing XTerm*color4 in .Xdefaults, but that only removes the blue in some places.

Another Eterm fan here

[Rydain]

I use terminal emulators for two purposes: accessing the CLI on my own box and occasionally ssh'ing to another Linux machine. I don't need compatibility with a ginormous variety of Unices or various other features that are implemented in other terminal emulators but lacking in Eterm (I really don't do that much work in a shell), but I am fond of perty desktop effects. Thus, I've been a very happy camper since I figured out the command-line arguments to produce a pseudotransparent Eterm in my choice of color. ^_^

Terminal Emulators Reviewed

[Anonymous Coward]

xterm: sux.

kermit: sux.

hyperterm: sux.

telnet: sux.

rxvt: not bad, but has some non-functionality that sux.

ssh: as a terminal emulator, it sux. Ought to be more tightly integrated into a base Unix system and have total control over loaning and reclaiming pseudo terminals.

Re:Karma whoring not yet your cup of tea?

[Anonymous Coward]

You really haven't figured this out yet. Why don't you shut up and listen?

Not a terribly well done article

[Eskarel]

Don't get me wrong, I like seeing review articles on things like this. However, it really doesn't seem to be much of a review. He basically says xterm is good, that the built in terminals for KDE and GNOME are ok, and that there are other terminals out there.

I didn't really find this all that useful, because the only terminals he really goes into any depth on are the ones pretty well everyone has already used. The only thing he says about RXVT(the only non standard terminal he goes into any detail about) is that he wishes they hadn't taken out scrolling.

Color Support

[GamerGeek]

One thing that bothers me about terminal emulators is that all of the "modern" terminal emulators, Konsole, Gnome Terminal, etc., use the OLD color model. Only RXVT and it's derivatives use the "new" color model. The old model had support for 8 colors and blink (twitch), as well as some other more or less useless modes. The "new" color model supports 16 colors. I actually support commercial terminal applications that use the new color model. It's very frustrating that I can't get 16 colors out of xterm,gterm or anything else not from the RXVT codebase. For that matter why are we limited to 16 colors? Why not 256 or higher?

I prefer

[Grizzlysmit]

Multi Gnome Terminal http://multignometerm.sourceforge.net/ best Terminal emulator I've ever seen.

Re:I Love Terminal Emulators

[Grizzlysmit]

I REALLY miss the old /. where people knew what the hell they where talking about.

What you mean it's not just me, yeah there's been a definite downward trend in the last 3 or 4 years

Re:I Love Terminal Emulators

[DAldredge]

No, it's not you. The old /. is dead, next to no one who hacks posts anymore, if you can't buy it in a box it appears that people don't care.

sigh.,

VaraTerm

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition to putty, you might also want to check out varaterm:

http://www.routrek.co.jp/product/varaterm/