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)

"Still an important tool"

[tcopeland]

....right on.

VIM and the VIM/Ruby [rubyforge.org] syntax/indent files... that's all you need for some mad Ruby programming.

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: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:TeraTerm

[Pete (big-pete)]

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.

I used to use TeraTerm, but a couple of years ago I switched to PuTTY [greenend.org.uk] and haven't looked back. Great application (and just as free as TeraTerm!).

-- Pete.

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: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.

Key Mapping

[knarfling]

One of the troubles with terminal emulators is the lack of ability to custom map function keys. We have an old HP Unix system and some software that looks for a specific escape sequence when a function key is pressed.

In Windows, NetTerm allows me to load a custom keymap file. I can connect to one system with one keymap, and connect to a completely different one with a different keyboard map. I have yet to find anything like that in Linux.

I have been able to edit the Xdefaults file to change the keymap for Xterm, but it is always the same keymap no matter who I connect to.

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.

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.