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)

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: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 [vector.co.jp] and TTSSH regularly for accessing remote systems from my Windows machine. Very nice tools, with plenty of options.

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.

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 [greenend.org.uk] 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.)

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 [slashdot.org] for more information.

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 [greenend.org.uk]. Works like a charm in all flavors of Win32.

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.

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.

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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: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:TeraTerm

[bucky0]

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

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: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.

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 [uspto.gov] on April 20, 2000; 71 more egregiously broad claims to follow. This is sick.

Re:They forgot one

[devnullify]

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

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.

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: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.

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.