Re: Terminals - Comparison ?
On Thu, 8 May 2003 21:52:39 +0100, John Gay wrote:
[ Michael S Daines wrote :]
>>Just started using Debian and KDE again recently and I have a
>>question: What are the different terminals available and what
>>are their advantages and disadvantages?
>>
>Talk about a loaded question (-;
>
>That all depends on what you expect from a terminal. Basically, they just
>provide a simulation of a shell login CLI. After that, the rest is eye
>candy.
Hmm .. I have to disagree here - there's also the question of which
real-world terminal(s) is(are) emulated by the terminal package. If
all you need to do is run a shell and interact with simple scroll-mode
commands then you won't care much about the emulation, but if you want
to login to the usual kind of applications on legacy (big-iron) remote
systems (via Telnet or SSH), or if you want to use a local screen-mode
Linux application (e.g. a decent editor, or a curses application) then
you need to think about the emulation your terminal provides.
This has a bearing on which format effectors (escape sequences) the
(emulated) terminal can understand and obey.
(AFAIK) All Linux terminal emulations will offer the standard "Linux
console" emulation - which seems intended for simple scroll mode
command input & output, but also supports the popular editors.
If you run something that produces output that looks all messed up,
then it's likely you've either configured the wrong terminal type
environment variable ($TERM), or your terminal doesn't support some of
the escape sequences that the software is using.
Most emulations generally also mimic one or other of the terminals in
the legendary DEC VTnnn series (for both Linux and Win32), and, of
those, most emulations actually try to implement no more than the
VT102, which was a fairly basic terminal. I believe this applies to
xterm, eterm, and rxvt.
At my place of work, we run a lot of VMS-based "green-screen"
applications which want to use terminal escape sequences that only a
VT420 offers, and also some which were introduced with VT220s. I
believe Konsole offers "VT220+", which is VT220 with some of the more
useful enhancements from VT320 onwards.
Most people can just ignore all this, but it becomes an issue for some
of us.
One of my usual quests on any given machine I have to use is to find a
good VT420 emulation. I'd also pay good beer to find a useful HP9000
terminal emulation (for running things on HPUX systems) - all pointers
gratefully received.
For my purposes, Konsole is currently far and away the best terminal
package for use on KDE.
If you run any other terminal package, make sure it's patched up to
date - a serious security issue was discovered relatively recently
(Feb.2003) to do with the way almost all Linux terminal emulations
handled an escape sequence whose purpose is to set the window title.
(See http://www.iss.net/security_center/static/11414.php)
I've droned on far too long now ;-) - sorry.
Nick Boyce
Bristol, UK
--
`To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to,
all of life's problems' --Homer J. Simpson
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