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

"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"

[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.

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

[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: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: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

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.