XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought • Hacker News Board

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#11

Post by SllX » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 7:15 PM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #7

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39... The Nongraphical GUI XCalc After Several Resizings https://miro.medium.com/max/434/0*LIDAYbj5NRANRGl7.gif X was designed to run three programs: xterm, xload, and xclock. (The idea of a window manager was added as an afterthought, and it shows.) For the first few years of its development at MIT, these were, in fact, the only programs that ran under the wi…

Here’s a non-Medium version[1], since Medium is similarly but completely unrelatedly, a disaster.

[1]http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disast...

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#12

Post by UI_at_80x24 » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 7:17 PM UTC

I use a mixed environment. My servers are FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and about 5 different linux distros.

I can only get consistent screen output if I use Xterm. rxvt, Alcrtty (sp?), Konsole, Gnome Terminal and all others that I have tried mungle ncurses, and/or other screen decorations (like using ASCII +------+, or TAB/Space, "decorations").

Even if I do get rxvt dialed in from one client, if I connect from a different workstation with a different client it's all a mess again.

I know xterm is the slowest of the bunch, but it always works with minimal putzing.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#13

Post by jasonjayr » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 7:20 PM UTC

asguy wrote: post #6

For people interested in playing around with different terminal emulators, you’d do yourself a service trying kitty [ https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty ]. It made my experience on high DPI screens far better. You can find it packaged up in the usual places (e.g. Debian).

I've recently taken up alacritty (+ tmux), which is fast; nice, and scales on displays sensibly.

I'd been using urxvt w/ a plugin for tabs for eons previously. I'be been mutating my tmux config to match the urxvt + screen binding I've been used to.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#14

Post by zbuf » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 7:21 PM UTC

nickjj wrote: post #10

Here's a few other useful binds related to zooming out, in and resetting zoom: Ctrl minus: smaller-vt-font() \n\ Ctrl plus: larger-vt-font() \n\ Ctrl 0: set-vt-font(d) \n\ And 2 other config options to help reduce trailing spaces when selecting text: xterm*highlightSelection: true xterm*trimSelection: true

Thanks for those trim settings, useful!

I'll swap you for these. I don't want any automatic opening of URLs, but I do want to make it easier to copy-paste them:

  xterm*on3Clicks: regex [^ ''""()$+]*
  xterm*on4Clicks: line
  xterm*on5Clicks: group

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#15

Post by dharmab » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 7:37 PM UTC

asguy wrote: post #6

For people interested in playing around with different terminal emulators, you’d do yourself a service trying kitty [ https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty ]. It made my experience on high DPI screens far better. You can find it packaged up in the usual places (e.g. Debian).

I switched to kitty because it supports a killer feature I became accustomed to in iTerm- a keybind for "Open a new terminal in the same directory as the current terminal."

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#16

Post by gnu8 » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 7:40 PM UTC

SllX wrote: post #11

DonHopkins wrote: post #7

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39... The Nongraphical GUI XCalc After Several Resizings https://miro.medium.com/max/434/0*LIDAYbj5NRANRGl7.gif X was designed to run three programs: xterm, xload, and xclock. (The idea of a window manager was added as an afterthought, and it shows.) For the first few years of its development at MIT, these were, in fact, the only programs that ran under the wi…

Here’s a non-Medium version[1], since Medium is similarly but completely unrelatedly, a disaster. [1] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disast...

The original UNIXUX site is very clever, but if the guy who actually wrote it is linking to Medium instead, I’m not sure if we can overrule him.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#17

Post by chrisseaton » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

asguy wrote: post #6

For people interested in playing around with different terminal emulators, you’d do yourself a service trying kitty [ https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty ]. It made my experience on high DPI screens far better. You can find it packaged up in the usual places (e.g. Debian).

> Offloads rendering to the GPU

I don't understand this - isn't all rendering on a typical macOS or Linux desktop done via the GPU?

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#18

Post by ogogmad » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 7:42 PM UTC

Does XTerm support unicode?

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#19

Post by markstos » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 7:46 PM UTC

`xterm` lacks Wayland support-- a more secure alternative to X11.

For a fast terminal with Wayland support, check out `alacritty` or foot:

https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot

`foot` (foo terminal) benchmarks faster than alacritty and offers a client/server mode for even faster startup for new terminal windows.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#20

Post by qnxub » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 7:47 PM UTC

I've found the latency of Konsole to be phenomenally low. I can definitely tell the difference between Konsole and GTK-based terminals, but I can't really tell the difference between the latency of Konsole and XTerm.