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Integrating a VT220 into my life

drewdevault.com

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Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#21

Post by frou_dh »

mark-r wrote: post #13
shmerl wrote: post #7

Or you could just run cool-retro-term[1] for the similar visual effect. [1]: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

Those examples all seem to have excessive bleed from the bright areas. If those were physical devices, I'd be turning down the brightness control immediately. Anybody come up with a version for iOS or Android yet? Seeing it on a tablet would be a real juxtaposition.

iOS (and Mac) has Cathode: http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/

I recall finding the rendering impressive when playing around with the Mac version.

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#22

Post by shmerl »

mark-r wrote: post #13
shmerl wrote: post #7

Or you could just run cool-retro-term[1] for the similar visual effect. [1]: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

Those examples all seem to have excessive bleed from the bright areas. If those were physical devices, I'd be turning down the brightness control immediately. Anybody come up with a version for iOS or Android yet? Seeing it on a tablet would be a real juxtaposition.

It has various color and brightness controls, so you can adjust it.

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#23

Post by dsr_ »

tgflynn wrote: post #20
tacostakohashi wrote: post #15

I had a Wyse dumb terminal attached to my main Linux workstation for a few years in the late 90s, back when such things were fairly easy to pick up for free. Its not to be sneezed at for doing serious programming work. The green on black, text only CRT was super high contrast (especially compared to any modern LCD), and the complete lack of distractions that come with a multitasking desktop environment (email notific…

Is the contrast on an old CRT really better than on a modern LCD screen ? I find that a bit hard to believe but I certainly don't have any way to check. You could run a plain vanilla window manager with a single xterm if you want to avoid distractions.

It depends. You can crank up the brightness much higher on a CRT, and so you can get better contrast in a sunny room. In a dark room, any decent LCD and any half-decent CRT can get the characters uncomfortably bright.

But it's only 80x25! I may have read megabytes of email and Usenet on such things, but I always lusted over the big displays of the Suns that could fit 40 rows down, and change character size to match my desires.

So I'm all for adding more screen real estate, but a VT220 isn't my pick for best way to do that. I prefer a second large monitor in portrait mode.

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#25

Post by vmorgulis »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #12
jamescun wrote: post #5

I was discussing an identical project with a coworker a while back, and have been stalking ebay for VT2X0s occasionally since. However they seem to be incredibly rare in the UK, and all the listings shown require shipping from the US with monstrous fees. Although my idea was not necessarily integration in to my work flow, more a dashboard of network/server stats etc.

Author here. I got the pictured one refurbished through vecmar.com, and I just bought a second one on eBay (for use at home).

Very cool post :)

The VT220 supports Sixels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel

I wonder if PySixel would work on real hardware: https://github.com/saitoha/PySixel

HN thread about libsixel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340367

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#28

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

vmorgulis wrote: post #25
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. I got the pictured one refurbished through vecmar.com, and I just bought a second one on eBay (for use at home).

Very cool post :) The VT220 supports Sixels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel I wonder if PySixel would work on real hardware: https://github.com/saitoha/PySixel HN thread about libsixel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340367

That's pretty cool! It reminds me of a similar project I did called z80e, which is an emulator for TI calculators [0]. It uses unicode braille to "render" the screen onto a terminal. Doesn't work on the VT220, though, for obvious reasons.

[0] https://github.com/KnightOS/z80e

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#29

Post by tacostakohashi »

dsr_ wrote: post #23
tgflynn wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the contrast on an old CRT really better than on a modern LCD screen ? I find that a bit hard to believe but I certainly don't have any way to check. You could run a plain vanilla window manager with a single xterm if you want to avoid distractions.

It depends. You can crank up the brightness much higher on a CRT, and so you can get better contrast in a sunny room. In a dark room, any decent LCD and any half-decent CRT can get the characters uncomfortably bright. But it's only 80x25! I may have read megabytes of email and Usenet on such things, but I always lusted over the big displays of the Suns that could fit 40 rows down, and change character size to match m…

Sure, CRTs have better contrast than LCDs in general, but monochrome CRTs have incredible contrast. I guess it's because they don't have separate red / green / blue subpixels (2/3rds of which would be off for green on a color CRT). Also, the particular shade of green phosphor they use is really intense, I guess they just use the wavelength the eye is most sensitive too, because they don't care about how it mixes with other colors.

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#30

Post by paulmd »

Quasi-related:

I've always wanted an ultra-low-power dumb terminal using eInk paper displays - something you could hit days of runtime with using a small battery pack. eInk uses no power when they're not updating - so idling or long-running operations would hardly use any power.

So far the easiest approach I've found is using a hacked Kindle with an attached keyboard. You can run a terminal client on it and ssh into another system, which I think is a sensible access mode.

Ideally, something like the AVR PicoPower microcontrollers would be fantastic - they run on ultra-low-voltage, eat 1 mA/MIPS, and idle down to basically nothing (<1ma active and a few dozen microamps during sleep). ssh is probably out of the question but I could toss a VT100 stack on it. Unfortunately the eInk display is the hard part there - most eInk parts have very poor documentation.

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