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XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

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Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#91

Post by pjmlp »

bitwize wrote: post #85
znpy wrote: post #51

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 t…

> All these Xorg/X11 problems people complain about... I honestly don't see them. That's because DonHopkins is shitposting quotes from the Unix Haters Handbook, which came out in 1994 and contains gripes about Unix dating back to the 80s. The Unix ecosystem, including X11, evolved a teensy tiny bit since then.

One wouldn't notice that, given how many eschew the progress made and live in the command line as if stuck in the 80's.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#92

Post by pjmlp »

bitwize wrote: post #24

Yeah, I'd say xterm is pretty freakin' awesome. While Hackernews was busy grooming their Alacritty setup and holding drag races between it, iTerm, and whatever bloated terminal Microsoft came up with to see which could cat a huge file the fastest, I've been just using xterm. xterm -- it's the standard terminal emulator. xterm: * actually emulates a terminal and passes a set of compliance tests to determine how VT-com…

Alongside fvwm (the original one), I imagine.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#93

Post by [deleted] »

bitwize wrote: post #85
znpy wrote: post #51

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 t…

> All these Xorg/X11 problems people complain about... I honestly don't see them. That's because DonHopkins is shitposting quotes from the Unix Haters Handbook, which came out in 1994 and contains gripes about Unix dating back to the 80s. The Unix ecosystem, including X11, evolved a teensy tiny bit since then.

[deleted]

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#94

Post by 3np »

jd3 wrote: post #50

Something that I noticed recently is that the latency/input lag feels lower in xterm compared to unicode-rxvt. I used urxvt from ~2011 until a couple of months ago and I have been really liking the speed and simplicity of xterm since then.

Maybe we have some difference in configuration, but I don't have any perceivable difference between the two - still on urxvt since way back.

Background transparency is the one feature keeping me from considering xterm. I like the URL handling hack in OP, but I'm also a bit married to some urxvt plugins (URL handler, trimming whitespace when copying)

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#95

Post by enriquto »

mkesper wrote: post #86
linsomniac wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use xterm because it's one of the only terminal emulators that allows me to disable the alt-screen (titeInhibit). Apparently I'm one of the few, but when I vi/view a file and exit, or read a man page and go back to the command line, I still want to be able to reference what I was just looking at.

Absolutely! I often use cat in tmux instead of less because of this. Will try xterm now, too.

You can use the -X option to less to avoid it clearing the screen. To set this option by default, put "export LESS=-X" on your profile.

If you want the same sane behavior for vim, add "set t_ti= t_te=" to your .vimrc.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#96

Post by enriquto »

pjmlp wrote: post #91
bitwize wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All these Xorg/X11 problems people complain about... I honestly don't see them. That's because DonHopkins is shitposting quotes from the Unix Haters Handbook, which came out in 1994 and contains gripes about Unix dating back to the 80s. The Unix ecosystem, including X11, evolved a teensy tiny bit since then.

One wouldn't notice that, given how many eschew the progress made and live in the command line as if stuck in the 80's.

It's not as much "the command line", but being able to talk to your computer using a human-like language, instead of pointing with your finger like a baby or a monkey.

Do you know any computer/user interface that is based on writing what you want to do? (instead of selecting it from a small list of possibilities) The only one that I know is the "primitive" command line.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#97

Post by robin_reala »

Jasper_ wrote: post #82
gumby wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But my point is that an Ann Arbor Ambassador terminal (with logic, not even an 8-bit processor) talking to a VAX 750 (about 1/2 MIPS, also passing data from kernel into user space) was lightning fast. The internal processor that does nothing but scan my laptop's keyboard to send events to the "computer" is more powerful than the setup we used to have. Yet the entire thing is slower. My Mac doesn't draw any faster tha…

> My Mac doesn't draw any faster than the Alto I used in the 70s. Yes it absolutely does, you just don't notice because of the increase in fidelity. What was then 640x480 pixels is now a 4K display. The total number of pixels is several orders of magnitude more, the number of colors is now 16.7 million rather than 256, and the complexity of the scene has increased where we now have anti-aliased text and alpha blendin…

Nit, but 640×480 -> 4k is single order of magnitude difference (307,200 -> 8,294,400).

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#98

Post by gumby »

Jasper_ wrote: post #82
gumby wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But my point is that an Ann Arbor Ambassador terminal (with logic, not even an 8-bit processor) talking to a VAX 750 (about 1/2 MIPS, also passing data from kernel into user space) was lightning fast. The internal processor that does nothing but scan my laptop's keyboard to send events to the "computer" is more powerful than the setup we used to have. Yet the entire thing is slower. My Mac doesn't draw any faster tha…

> My Mac doesn't draw any faster than the Alto I used in the 70s. Yes it absolutely does, you just don't notice because of the increase in fidelity. What was then 640x480 pixels is now a 4K display. The total number of pixels is several orders of magnitude more, the number of colors is now 16.7 million rather than 256, and the complexity of the scene has increased where we now have anti-aliased text and alpha blendin…

Well the Alto was 6060 x 808 B&W bitmap display, but the machine was maybe .25 MIPS. The UI was pretty snappy -- faster than an IBM PC display.

Yours is the first comment to actually address my question.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#100

Post by tutfbhuf »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #37
tutfbhuf wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Things like tabs and a proper scrollbar are a minimum for me. I use xterm in tmux, no need for native scrollbar or tabs.

Do you mean the reverse? I'm using a number of applications, the terminal is but one. So, I find a consistent interface is desirable.

I like composability, to stack software together, like chaining coreutils in bash. Vim inside of Tmux inside of Xterm inside of Xorg on Linux. Every software adds its functionality to the stack, but no more.
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