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Unix Operating Systems Software Linux

Terminal Emulators Reviewed 328

Posted by Hemos from the learning-the-lines dept.
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)
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Terminal Emulators Reviewed More

Terminal Emulators Reviewed

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  • Pasted article (Score:4, Informative)

    by LincolnQ ( 648660 ) on Thursday June 17, 2004 @01:41PM (#9455054)
    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 (Score:3, Interesting)

      by shic ( 309152 )
      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 (Score:5, Interesting)

        by isaac ( 2852 ) on Thursday June 17, 2004 @02:25PM (#9455603)

        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

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • 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? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jareeedo ( 217038 ) on Thursday June 17, 2004 @01:42PM (#9455074) Homepage
    One day, dual-booting will be considered "old-school." I, and my 12 partitions, live for that day.
    • One day, dual-booting will be considered "old-school." I, and my 12 partitions, live for that day.


      That's nothing. Try dual-booting on a dual-processor, DDR RAM, dual-head box that is of course 2u ("double u") in size... and logging in twice.
    • One day, dual-booting will be considered "old-school." I, and my 12 partitions, live for that day.
      Dude, that's not dual booting. It's duoDECIMAL booting!
      • Only if you use only one partition per OS. For a Unix-like OS I would recommend a minimum of three: /, /home and swap. With a bit of care and forethought you could share home and swap among all systems, but there are still advantages to keeping them separate.

  • "Still an important tool" (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tcopeland ( 32225 ) * <tom@NoSPaM.thomasleecopeland.com> on Thursday June 17, 2004 @01:42PM (#9455077) Homepage
    ....right on.

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

    • Re:"Still an important tool" (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      VIM and the Funge Specification [quadium.net] ... that's all you need for some made Befunge programming. Can my plug get modded up too?

    • Re:"Still an important tool" (Score:4, Interesting)

      by frodo from middle ea ( 602941 ) on Thursday June 17, 2004 @02:11PM (#9455415) Homepage
      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.

  • TeraTerm (Score:5, Informative)

    by pjwhite ( 18503 ) on Thursday June 17, 2004 @01:44PM (#9455096) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:TeraTerm (Score:4, Informative)

      by macklin01 ( 760841 ) on Thursday June 17, 2004 @01:54PM (#9455234) Homepage

      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.

      • 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 (Score:3, Informative)

          by archen ( 447353 )
          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 (Score:3, Informative)

          by bucky0 ( 229117 )
          Umm, PuTTY does support public key authentication, I use it myself.
          • Does it work with a ssh server (openssh) , using a RSA key for authentication ? I haven't managed to get it to work, but I guess I give putty a try one more time.

            Mind you I don't want to authenticate the server, what I want is the ability to get authenticated using my public key.

            • Re:TeraTerm (Score:3, Informative)

              by bucky0 ( 229117 )
              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.

      • Re:TeraTerm (Score:2, Informative)

        by Draco_es ( 628422 )
        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 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Pete (big-pete) ( 253496 ) * <peter_endean@hotmail.com> on Thursday June 17, 2004 @01:56PM (#9455252)

      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.

    • I used Tera Term Pro too for a long time, but recently I've switched to PuTTY which I got from OpenCD 1.4. There is little between them in terms of what they do but PuTTY feels a little bit more integrated in Windows and is more actively developed.

      It's also a bit easier to set up too since SSH works out of the box without hunting around for the patch that you have to unzip over Tera Term to get it working. It also supports SSH v2.

  • yeha (Score:2, Informative)

    by 2057 ( 600541 )
    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 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hazy_fakie ( 781520 ) on Thursday June 17, 2004 @01:45PM (#9455105)
    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 :)
    • Finally an article on something different from GNOME/KDE/any other GUI.
      Not really, all he talks about are gnome-terminal and konsole...

      Given, most of the rest are rxvt spiced up, with eye candy thrown in.

      But if the grumpy editor wants to hold forth on memory usage, I would suggest he consider the overhead the gnome and kde libraries impose in order to use their terminal emulator...

      • Re:Love CLI (Score:4, Informative)

        by On Lawn ( 1073 ) on Thursday June 17, 2004 @02:39PM (#9455808) Journal
        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.
      • One thing he failed to mention is that some of the newer terminals are butt slow. For example, a simple test shows that gnome-terminal is 4x slower at updating (measured with ls -1R in a big directory hierarchy) than xterm. I know this is likely because of utf support, but since I really don't need utf (if English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me), I just stick with xterm. Now if only they man page authors hadn't broken all the man pages so that I have to 'alias man="LANG=C man"'.

        Als

    • Re:Love CLI (Score:5, Interesting)

      by The Angry Mick ( 632931 ) on Thursday June 17, 2004 @02:16PM (#9455474) Homepage

      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 (Score:4, Informative)

      by hackstraw ( 262471 ) * on Thursday June 17, 2004 @02:25PM (#9455600)
      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.
    • A while back I recall reading (on /.?) about how Microsoft was asking for input from the community regarding what Linux has that Windows does not, ans what people would want with Windows in that respect. Besides all the obvious answers, one of the first that came to mind was the lack of a comfortable CLI. Of course there's the DOS prompt, but it's just not as easy to call an application as it is in a traditional *nix shell (let's put aside Cygwin for the moment).

      What I find interesting is how so far, in

    • Just out of curiosity, how many Linux users out there even use the GUI features?

      I use Linux every day, but all I use GNOME for is to open a bunch of terminals.

      Even system configurations, I edit /etc/sysconfig/* stuff instead of using the GUI tool.
    • Last I checked, moving a mouse and applying single and double clicks on a variety of mouse buttons is a 'manual' process. The computer does not perform these actions for you.

    • Re:Love CLI (Score:3, Insightful)

      by iabervon ( 1971 )
      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

  • Support LWN! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mattdm ( 1931 ) on Thursday June 17, 2004 @01:45PM (#9455112) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ttfkam ( 37064 ) on Thursday June 17, 2004 @01:47PM (#9455128) Homepage Journal
    Mindterm [appgate.com].

    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.
    • Tried it. Stupid Netzis at work won't let me ssh out. Bastards.

    • Re:They forgot one (Score:3, Informative)

      by ari_j ( 90255 )
      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 init
      • Difference being that (a) the person who owns that computer would have to be okay with you downloading programs on their system, (b) that it's a Windows box that hasn't been locked down or that you are an administrator on, (c) that it isn't a Mac OS 9 box, etc.

        I can access my server from public libraries if need be. Public libraries on the whole aren't too keen about installing random (to them) pieces of software on their computers. I haven't yet come across a library computer that didn't have Java thoug

        • Re:They forgot one (Score:2, Informative)

          by devnullify ( 561782 )
          $ du -h mindterm.jar
          592K mindterm.jar
          $ du -h putty.exe
          364K putty.exe
          • Mindterm Lite comes in much smaller than the full version. Just download the source code from their site a build with the "lite" target. Remember, it doesn't need to have all of the bells and whistles of a standalone SSH client. All you need are the portion(s), the cipher(s), and the mode(s) that are necessary to talk to that one server.

  • Where's PuTTY? (Score:5, Informative)

    by KlomDark ( 6370 ) on Thursday June 17, 2004 @01:51PM (#9455206) Homepage Journal
    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.)
    • PuTTY is my favorite also. Three cheers for PuTTY!
    • There's also another one I use that is simple and has an SSH extension. It's called TeraTermPro [vector.co.jp]

      It's older but seems to work like gangbusters.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • 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.

    • Claim 1 (Score:2, Informative)

      by Alexis de Torquemada ( 785848 )

      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 includ

      • Looks like either a browser or a terminal emulator to me all right- after all, an address can be either a phone number or a URL or an IP address, it really doesn't matter. Definately claim 1 covers all of the above.

  • Blue on black... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mratitude ( 782540 ) on Thursday June 17, 2004 @01:57PM (#9455262) Journal
    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 (Score:4, Informative)

    by stryck9 ( 670369 ) on Thursday June 17, 2004 @01:58PM (#9455280)
    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 used to have a turkmenistan domain name, which ended with .tm (get it? the trademark domain! ha. oy. i was a dumb highschooler.) Anyways, my rdns pointed at the .tm address, and when I went to download the secureCRT package, with strong crypto, the website said to the effect of "Go home terrorist!" I had to update my DNS entry to download the darned software.
    • I have both ScureCRT and SecureFTP, and they are both high quality products. In particular I love SecureFTP because if the connection has timed out when you try to transfer something, it just makes the connection and transfers the file, rather than petulantly complaining (like WS_FTP) that the link is dead. Yeah. And?
  • 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 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)

  • Linux Weekly News has a now free review...

    Free as in beer? or free as in slashdotted?

  • People you need to check out Multi-Gnome-Terminal [sourceforge.net].

    It supports everything that Gnome-Term does but has much better tab support (including moving tabs). Better shortcut key management. Allows splitting a terminal horizontally and or vertically within a tab. Has terminal "bonding" allowing typing the same thing in multiple windows. Supports background images with brightness contrast/tinting/gamma like Eterm, but configurable graphically.

    Only thing is it hasn't been binary pkgs haven't been rereleased

  • should the terminal emulator be revisited? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CoughDropAddict ( 40792 ) on Thursday June 17, 2004 @02:20PM (#9455538) Homepage
    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.

  • what do you use on OS X? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ChristTrekker ( 91442 ) on Thursday June 17, 2004 @02:37PM (#9455772)

    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.

  • I use mlterm because of its great support of UTF-8 rendering. It seems to feature all the cool features from Eterm as well, but I noticed that sometimes, when a lot of text is scrolling fast, the terminal seems to lag a bit.

    Does anyone know of another *term with good UTF-8 support (which is not the case of Eterm, alas) ?
  • If you run something like irssi in screen, and then open a second tab in the window, you will have the first window turn entirely blank-on-blue background.

    These [gnome.org] two [gnome.org] bugs refer to this problem. Apparently setting TERM=vt102 helps, but this problem keeps g-t from being the 'perfect' terminal emulator for the GNOME desktop (it means at least one person I know uses konsole on gnome.)
  • I haven't read the article since it now appears Slashdottted, but, if anyone cares, personally I really like Eterm [eterm.org]. It's lightweight, fast, and also quite pretty--it has a lot of nifty background images built in and it allows for pseudo-transparency. Very customizable, too. I use it on my desktop Linux machine all the time.

  • How about actual terminal firmware VMs? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by swb ( 14022 ) on Thursday June 17, 2004 @02:58PM (#9456043)
    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.
  • For those who REALLY like the command line, here's another terminal emulator that works straight off the raw Linux console: Qodem [sourceforge.net]. Check the README and screenshots page to understand a little why I felt compelled to clone a DOS-based BBS-era program. :)

    Currently on the blurry alpha/pre-alpha stage, but another six months and it'll be pretty cool.

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