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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)
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.
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.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Crotch. I was hoping to hear about 3270 emulators. Now those are da bomb.
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.
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.
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.
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.
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.
cutting and pasting SUCK in putty... however it is the best windows FREE ssh v2.0 client
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.
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.
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.