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

[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

[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!

the only one?

[Jareeedo]

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

"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: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

[bucky0]

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

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.

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.

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: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

[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

[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.

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.

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

[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

[devnullify]

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

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?

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. ;)

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.

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: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?

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.

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: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.

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:I Love Terminal Emulators

[whiteranger99x]

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

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.

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.