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XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

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Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#61

Post by DonHopkins »

andrelaszlo wrote: post #27
markstos wrote: post #19

`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.

What about xclock?

Why use xclock when you can use Sun's "clocktool"?

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39...

X has had its share of $5,000 toilet seats — like Sun’s Open Look clock tool, which gobbles up 1.4 megabytes of real memory! If you sacrificed all the RAM from 22 Commodore 64s to clock tool, it still wouldn’t have enough to tell you the time. Even the vanilla X11R4 “xclock” utility consumed 656K to run. And X’s memory usage is increasing.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#62

Post by DonHopkins »

gnu8 wrote: post #16
SllX wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Shameless plug: You could buy a copy of the book! ;)

https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Haters-Handbook-UNIX-Haters-line...

Or just download the pdf file:

https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#63

Post by saagarjha »

gumby wrote: post #44

> ...it turns out xterm has incredibly low input latency compared to modern terminals. This boggles my mind. What on earth does a windowed terminal need to do that should result in any latency on a modern machine? We had full ANSI-addressible displays that ran faster than the eye could read over serial lines in the 1980s. What on earth additional does a terminal program do and why would I want that?

Well, it first needs to take the your input and pass it through the HID subsystem into userspace to the appliction, which then responds to it and sends it to the terminal, wjocj collects the output and then emulates whatever control codes there are, then updates its internal model of whatever PTY thing it is emulating, then sends that to the screen and wait for the window server to pick up on those changes and then double buffer it onto the screen…it's complicated, to say the least.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#64

Post by aduros »

padthai wrote: post #56
dharmab wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Try this:

    XTerm.vt100.translations: #override \n\
        Ctrl T: spawn-new-terminal()

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#65

Post by aduros »

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

Very handy, thanks!

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#66

Post by ddingus »

DonHopkins wrote: post #60
mcguire wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Only the server, actually serves the graphics to the user.

Within the context of the X Window System, the server is the body of code responsible for delivering the display to the user viewing it.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#68

Post by m463 »

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…

I always ran xdaliclock

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#69

Post by Aloha »

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…

The only way I've found to get consistency is use GNU screen as a translator.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#70

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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…

Xterm has popup menus, though I don't know when they were added. I've blown people's minds when they saw them. There's also the Tektronix vector terminal emulation in a separate window. It's also trivial to modernize it with features like scroll wheel support because of the flexibility of X resources.
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