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XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

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Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#51

Post by znpy »

All these Xorg/X11 problems people complain about... I honestly don't see them.

I've been using Xorg in one form or another since 2005-2006 and frankly since we all got automatic configuration and said godbye to Xorg.conf it's been a very very pleasant experience.

I've been using both nVidia and intel cards, 1/2/3 monitors (in various arrangement) and network stuff (ssh -X and similar), and a videogame from time to time.

Even xterm, with the right fonts, it's a very nice setup. I almost can't see the difference between a gtk emacs window and an emacs session running in xterm-unicode with proper fonts and antialiasing.

Xorg might not be "optimal", but it works very well for me and I won't be switching to anything else until a wayland or whatever reach feature parity (including but not limited to network transparency).

Whatever,

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#52

Post by padthai »

Steltek wrote: post #8

I use xterm because I'm too lazy to switch, I guess. It was never bad enough for me to switch and it's present virtually everywhere, so I don't need to bother installing my favorite niche term (kind of like sticking with bash when zsh was indisputably more awesome). To the best of my knowledge, one downside is the text rendering is synchronous. Read a character off the tty, try to display it on the screen. It's fine…

> Many GNOME-ish terminals use vte which drops frames if it can't keep up rendering.

Cannot you that with Xterm too?

XTerm*fastScroll: true

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#53

Post by padthai »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #30

It's decent and supports direct-color and all the obscure features of xterm of course, that others don't like querying and setting the color palette. It doesn't support most(any?) of the bleeding-edge sequences for hyperlinks and underline styling. It may have better input latency than xfce, but what are you running it on, a 486? Maybe for RPi, but—it has poor paint performance as well. It will flash if you try to do…

What do you mean by scrollbar? Xterm has a scrollbar, and you can customize it with plenty of options.

Tabs I agree that it may be a showstopper for some, however in X you can use suckless tabbed to add support:

https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/

For some of us, we just want the fastest terminal out there (in latency and startup), because everything else will be taken care by the window manager or Tmux.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#54

Post by padthai »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #12

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 work…

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

I though that Xterm was the fastest in terms of latency and configured adequately, pretty going dealing with big amounts of text:

https://anarc.at/blog/2018-05-04-terminal-emulators-2/

Xterm*fastScroll: true

I am really grateful for Xterm, it is a great default for all my machines.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#55

Post by dharmab »

chrisseaton wrote: post #17
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?

Specifically, kitty uses VRAM as a font rendering cache: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/performance.html

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#56

Post by padthai »

dharmab wrote: post #15
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."

This is something that I never learnt how to do with Xterm, I put the keybinding in Bash:

bind -x '"\C-T": _terminal_here'

I would love to know how to execute a command from Xterm directly, I am sure that it is possible.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#57

Post by chrisseaton »

dharmab wrote: post #55
chrisseaton wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Specifically, kitty uses VRAM as a font rendering cache: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/performance.html

Right... but doesn't every serious desktop GUI framework already do that? They aren't drawing every glyph every time from the original curves, and where else would they store video data than... the video RAM.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#59

Post by DonHopkins »

SllX wrote: post #36
gnu8 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No one is getting overruled, you now have one additional choice of links to click on for the same material, free of charge.

Sadly the unixsux site lost its luster when Netscape disabled the _ cursor.

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/login.html

Here's my not-so-subtle Solaris joke about how AT&T was ruining Unix:

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/panic.html

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#60

Post by DonHopkins »

mcguire wrote: post #48
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…

Don, did you ever figure out the difference between a "client" and a "server"?

Sure: xterm a client of your display and keyboard and mouse, remote input and output services that the X11 server provides over the network.

And at the same time, a web browser is the client of computing and data servers in the cloud, provided over the network.

In reality, there can be many different client/server relationships existing in different directions over the same full duplex network connection. It's really a bi-directional multiplexed messaging channel, not a pure strict hierarchical relationship, and many client/server dependencies can go both ways over the same connection, at the same time. You can even run an ssh that opens tunnels in both directions, then tunnel X and http connections over that.

Once a connection is established, it really don't matter which end initiated the connection (or how many links and proxies and tunnels there are along the way) -- you're just sending messages both ways.

"Client/Server" is an over-simplified way of describing what's possible.

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