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Ask HN: What terminal emulator do you use ?

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Re: Ask HN: What terminal emulator do you use ?

#41

Post by pyre »

apotheon wrote: post #28
makecheck wrote: post #5

On the Mac, I use MacTelnet, even as a local terminal. It has an almost ridiculous number of features (compared to Terminal.app or iTerm, anyway), and is very configurable. The main problems are that it is mainly vt100/partial-xterm, and is a beta. On Linux or Solaris, I use "aterm". It works as well as xterm or rxvt. But it has a lot of nice interface tweaks, such as NeXT-style scrollbars, pseudo-transparency, more…

I used to use aterm, but one thing drove me to change -- Unicode support. Now, I use rxvt-unicode. Since making the move, though, I've grown to love rxvt-unicode's daemon mode and discovered that pseudo-transparency works better than it did on aterm. I mention my reasons for choosing rxvt-unicode over other terminal emulators here: http://sob.apotheon.org/?p=451

rxvt-unicode also supports true transparency when you have a composite manager active.

Re: Ask HN: What terminal emulator do you use ?

#42

Post by pyre »

pwmanagerdied wrote: post #3

Could someone explain the interest/value of this post to me? I'm not familiar with anything that would significantly distinguish them.

* Unicode support

* Transparency/Pseudo-transparency support

* Interactions with other systems and their termcap/terminfo files.

* Interaction with GNU screen (iirc, the 'auto-detect' feature of XFCE4-Terminal for which backspace sequence to send fails for me currently when using screen. I have to force it to use ^H as backspace)

* Support for more than just Type-1 fonts.

* How does the scrollback buffer work? gnome-terminal SUCKS when a wall of text hits the screen, while rxvt-unicode blows through it like nothing.

... There are many other things that could be brought up in relation to these (terminal emulators). For instance, rxvt-unicode has a powerful Perl API, and there are many modules that do things like (for instance) implement simple tabs for a rxvt-unicode window.

Re: Ask HN: What terminal emulator do you use ?

#43

Post by mhansen »

blasdel wrote: post #32

On Windows I use MinTTY -- it is basically perfect on that platform. It's bizarre how ridiculously terrible every other windows tty is: simple shit like text selection, copy-paste, window resizing, fonts, etc. is universally missing. I only discovered it due to my boss' "install everything" cygwin policy, as it's in their repo and its installer puts a link on your desktop. PuTTY is bad enough as an SSH client, much l…

Wonderful! Thanks for mentioning MinTTY, this handles the Win+Left resizing perfectly.

Re: Ask HN: What terminal emulator do you use ?

#44

Post by sykora »

I used to use konsole, because it was default with KDE. After some time I made a conscious effort and switched to rxvt-unicode, or urxvt. It's a great terminal emulator, once you've got it configured, but that process can be tough. The documentation for the really cool stuff has also been a tad incomplete for me.

Re: Ask HN: What terminal emulator do you use ?

#45

Post by makecheck »

jcromartie wrote: post #6

Terminal.app as of OS X 10.5 is my favorite terminal. I like to use rxvt under Cygwin.

Terminal.app is very good in many ways, but Apple really needs to work on the configuration mechanism before I can use it regularly.

I frequently want to make tweaks to one window, and I just can't stand having to make a new set of Preferences every time a window disagrees with the established settings. Since the sets contain everything (colors, terminal attributes, long lists of key mappings, etc.) there are potentially a lot of things to redo.

Also, what's bizarre is that opening a saved file has the side effect of automatically creating a new, permanent set of Preferences. There isn't much point in having files if Terminal insists on re-storing everything as Preferences anyway.

Re: Ask HN: What terminal emulator do you use ?

#46

Post by gaius »

blasdel wrote: post #32

On Windows I use MinTTY -- it is basically perfect on that platform. It's bizarre how ridiculously terrible every other windows tty is: simple shit like text selection, copy-paste, window resizing, fonts, etc. is universally missing. I only discovered it due to my boss' "install everything" cygwin policy, as it's in their repo and its installer puts a link on your desktop. PuTTY is bad enough as an SSH client, much l…

CME.EXE is about backwards compatibility. New work should be done in PowerShell' which is quite clever (think Unix pipes with COM objects instead of plain text).

Re: Ask HN: What terminal emulator do you use ?

#48

Post by jaspervdj »

cadillac wrote: post #29
apotheon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the daemon (aka "client/server") operation of rxvt-unicode, and the fact that with all its capabilities it's still smaller than xterm.

I've used the mode and I really liked it, except when it starts to behave buggy needing to kill the server loosing all the windows. I prefer to name it psycho mode.

I second rxvt-unicode. Very configurable, and works fine with a tiling window manager.

Re: Ask HN: What terminal emulator do you use ?

#50

Post by cturner »

blasdel wrote: post #32

On Windows I use MinTTY -- it is basically perfect on that platform. It's bizarre how ridiculously terrible every other windows tty is: simple shit like text selection, copy-paste, window resizing, fonts, etc. is universally missing. I only discovered it due to my boss' "install everything" cygwin policy, as it's in their repo and its installer puts a link on your desktop. PuTTY is bad enough as an SSH client, much l…

On putty: I'm surprised to hear all the bad vibes for putty - what's wrong with its terminal emulation? I adore putty - you can configure it so that it toggles full-screen with alt+enter and can load sessions with windows+r, 'putty -load {session name}'. It's easy to configure different colours for different profiles so it's easy to always have my production consoles in red. I haven't found such a straightforward way of getting that going in a linux desktop setting (other than using putty for linux which is unrefined). The default font isn't all that nice but I think I use terminal size 10 and that looks nice. Putty supports all the stuff you criticise - 'text selection, copy-paste, window resizing, fonts' - what's the downside? I tend to use it in gnu-screen and don't have problems with this.

On cmd: Funnily enough that cmd environment has become less powerful over the evolution of Windows. For instance, it used to be possible in win2k era to bundle a complete application as a batch file by having code stored as text and written out when it ran - through a couple of mechanisms using minor features. Those features which were subsequently removed, presumably to stop just this sort of hack. The latest versions of Windows don't have telnet as standard - I'm at a complete loss to know how I'm meant to do connectivity testing with clients who don't have it and don't have permission to install it - the telnet mechanism in Windows was bad enough as it was but now they've made things worse. I've found Windows scripting host to be very poor for doing networking. It's also very crippled.

(When I'm in OSX I use iTerm because it's the only way I've found to get a nice full-screen console under the current release of OSX)

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