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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)
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
One day, dual-booting will be considered "old-school." I, and my 12 partitions, live for that day.
Huh? I think you mean DOS emulator. Terminal emulators are for things like DEC VT220 emulation.
I use TeraTerm Pro and TTSSH regularly for accessing remote systems from my Windows machine. Very nice tools, with plenty of options.
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 :)
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.
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.)
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.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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.
I REALLY miss the old /. where people knew what the hell they where talking about.
I prefer SecureCRT for my emulation.. html
http://www.vandyke.com/products/index
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.
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.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
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.