Is there a terminal out there for me?

eyolf · 2006-02-09 12:31:53

I'm sure this has been discussed several times before, but I want to find the right terminal for me. So, this is not another "which xyz-app is best?" thread, but rather a question if I have overlooked something.

My candidates so far:

konsole
Terminal (xfce)
rxvt
mrxvt
urxvt
xterm
eterm
aterm

Dylan may be able to say, "You and me, we had it all", but I cant say the same: they all fall short on some account. I thought I had found a sweetheart in mrxvt, but alas...

My criteria are:
- speed: ideally I press f12 and the terminal is there. Konsole fails, Terminal is a little better, the rest are decent-to-good.

- tabs: It's great to have them. I can then have one instance open on all desktops, ready at hand whenever I need it. Nice and orderly. It may also affect speed, but not all the candidates perform equally well: Terminal takes just as long time to open a new tab as to open a new shell altogether. Mrxvt and Konsole win here: the new tabs are there immediately.

- fonts: this is important to me. I would love to be able to use proportional fonts in the console, but antialiased, truetype fonts is a minimum requirement. The *term consoles - can they use truetype fonts? This is where mrxvt fails, and capitally, I think: no unicode support (?), and the line drawings in mc don't work with tt fonts. I can start mc with an -a flag, but it's not ideal.

- configurability: they all have it, I suppose. After spending some hours looking into the X system for configuration, I can't say I dislike it, although I can't really say I like it either. A balance between accessibility (e.g. through menus) and wealth of options (through looooong lists of settings in ***rc files), is ideal.

So my judgement:
mrxvt: if it wasn't for the font issue...
Terminal: if it wasn't for the slowness, especially with new tabs...
Konsole: dito, especially at startup
xterm: ugly... if only I could find out how to use some nicer fonts... And no tabs. Same goes for the other *terms and the *xvts

Have I overlooked some must-have candidate which fulfills all my dreams? or some feature in some of the current candidates, which raises it to the top of my list?

Cam · 2006-02-09 13:12:15

What window manager do you use? If the WM supports tabs like fluxbox then the terminal emulator doesn't need to support tabs and urxvt could do fine. I use it and find I don't need tabs but at my resolution 4 terminals and firefox isn't a problem

patroclo7 · 2006-02-09 13:17:08

Just to confuse your ideas a bit more: you should get a look on tilda (in the AUR): speed can not be beaten (you launch hidden with X and you call it with F1); tabs perform very well, although the key bindings need to be improved in the next upstream versions; fonts are wonderful, very similar to those in Terminals.

May be it is not as configurable as xterm and eterm, but launched on all the virtual desktops without borders, it looks really nice.

Anyway, I use tilda hidden on all the desktops, and sometimes Eterm when I need a different non-tabbed terminal in another part of the screen.

eyolf · 2006-02-09 13:32:38

I've been playing around with the supposedly-tabbed version of urxvt, but everytime I start it, I get an error:

 urxvt: perl hook 0 evaluation error: Undefined subroutine &Scalar::Util::weaken called at /usr/lib/urxvt/urxvt.pm line 1048.

I don't know if this is fatal in any way - it seems to work fine, but I can't make the tabs appear. According to the website, one starts it with "urxvt -pe tabbed", but how does one open a new tab?
It looks nice, though: works fine with antialiased text, also withe the line drawings that mrxvt missed, so now the tabs are the only thing that stand between me and my future... :-)

RE: window manager: I use fluxbox and KDE, alternately. I've been considering the tab feature in fluxbox too. I'll see.

And Tilda... Hm. "Tilda is a console application taking after such classic first person shooters as Quake, Doom, and Half-Life." Sounds like something I MUST have :-)

Thanks for the tips anyway. Keep 'em coming

eyolf · 2006-02-09 14:58:37

I've tried to make the tilda package, but I get the following errors:

/usr/include/X11/Xlib.h:60:19: error: X11/X.h: No such file or directory
/usr/include/X11/Xlib.h:63:28: error: X11/Xfuncproto.h: No such file or directory
/usr/include/X11/Xlib.h:64:25: error: X11/Xosdefs.h: No such file or directory
In file included from /usr/include/vte/vte.h:27,
                 from tilda_window.c:21:
/usr/include/X11/Xlib.h:227: error: syntax error before 'Pixmap'
/usr/include/X11/Xlib.h:231: error: syntax error before 'font'

followed by c. 100 more lines of the same kind. I have the new Xorg 7 version - could that be the problem?

codemac · 2006-02-09 15:04:43

man screen

You don't need 'tab support' in your terminal.

xterm has the most features of any terminal, but thanks to terminfo and termcap bullshit, you probably will never see them. urxvt is considered "next best" as far as features, but it also supports eye candy fun-ness like transparency. Use one of those. Most of the other ones just can't measure up to the abilities these two support.

eyolf · 2006-02-09 15:32:34

now, that's some tool with potential, - even a non-geek like me (cf. my obsession with fonts) can see that. Thanks!

rezza · 2006-02-09 16:45:25

Wow, urxvt is awesome with the perl extensions...

I've just been playing around with it, and I've found that using "URxvt*perl-ext: tabbed,mark-urls" is great. Shift down to open a new tab, shift left/right to change between them (you can also click on new or the tab numbers in the tab bar). And the mark-urls is so useful for stuff like irssi - it makes urls inside urxvt clickable links. Saves having to hilight & middle-click in the browser.

man urxvtperl to find out more.

lucke · 2006-02-09 17:11:48

You could try yakuake (AUR) as well. It's like tilda, but KDEish (based on Konsole). You press F12 and voila, world of CLI lies open to you.

It seems to fit your requirements. If you actually are using KDE, it's the way to go.

patroclo7 · 2006-02-09 17:38:23

I am running the modular xorg in testing, but I did not meet this problem. However I upgraded the PKGBUILD in AUR to the 0.09.2 upstream version: may be it helps.

eyolf · 2006-02-09 17:40:15

it's nice... ish - I can imagine having it loaded on startup, and it would indeed be at hand at any time, but I miss the opportunity to quickly change the size: for mc I would want a maximized window, for vim, a vertically maximized, etc, so I would still need another shell for that kind of operations...
Some people are never satisfied, are they...
I only wish I could make urxvt work properly, with or without tabs

patroclo7 · 2006-02-09 17:52:24

You can modify the tilda size in the gui configuration (or in the plainly readable configuration file), and also manually through your windowmanager. If you have a suitably configurable wm, you can also maximize it (through, e.g.) a keychain operating when alt is pressed and the mouse is above the window.

For example, in my beloved pekwm, I press alt and resize tilda stretching the window with the right key of the mouse. And I could define sequences for full screen, horizontal and vertical maximizing

Otherwise, you could run tilda with window borders... but then it looses a lot of sex-appeal...

eyolf · 2006-02-10 08:30:14

This is becoming something of an ordeal.
First urxvt: I couldn't get a tabbar no matter what I did. In the end, I reinstalled perl (I had the version from testing, so I downgraded to current), and everything worked fine. YES! I could see an app with potential.
In the meantime, I had also had yakuake running, and I can't say for sure what went wrong, but some time while I was trying to remap the keyboard shortcuts to let yakuake have F12 and urxvt shift-F12, something must have gone wrong, because every time I now open urxvt, the window shrinks slowly to a tiny little square, just big enough to grab and resize. The changes stay, but it seems very unstable - the window borders seem to be uncertain if they really want to stay in place.
I've tried to make some application-specific settings for the size, but that has been its own can of worms: (1) the only application specific size setting that works, is "force", which is hardly what I want. (2) in general, if I go to "Application specific settings from the window menu, the field in the Window tab is filled with sth like "Application settings for <...>", but not in this case; that field is empty, and I'm warned that the settings i'm about to make, will apply to ALL windows, globally. If I do make some settings, with the correct info in the Window tab in place, this is not remembered the next time I open the app.
I've uninstalled yakuake (thinking that that may have been the problem, since the behaviour is vaguely similar to that of yakuake), but the problem persist.

Does anyone know where the problem lies? I have tried to check the settings in ~/.kde/share/config, but haven't found anything there.

In fluxbox, the shrinking problem does not happen, so it seems to be a KDE problem, but there's another one: the urxvt specific settings I have made in .Xresources do not apply. Phew. Perhaps I should just have stayed with the xfce Terminal...

phrakture · 2006-02-10 16:23:40

codemac wrote:

xterm has the most features of any terminal, but thanks to terminfo and termcap bullshit, you probably will never see them. urxvt is considered "next best" as far as features, but it also supports eye candy fun-ness like transparency. Use one of those. Most of the other ones just can't measure up to the abilities these two support.

I was just about to go there.
If you're looking for a quick little terminal, xterm is probably your man. You _can_ make it look good, with font/color tweaking. If you don't care about transparency, use xterm. urxvt (which I use) is very good. It supports quite alot of features, and has some experimental stuff in it too (a perl interpreter).

Sure urxvt supports tabbing, but screen should be far superior. You just need to 'learn' how to do it. There's a good k5 article here: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/9/16838/14935

Arch Linux

#1 2006-02-09 12:31:53

Is there a terminal out there for me?

#2 2006-02-09 13:12:15

Re: Is there a terminal out there for me?

#3 2006-02-09 13:17:08

Re: Is there a terminal out there for me?

#4 2006-02-09 13:32:38

Re: Is there a terminal out there for me?

#5 2006-02-09 14:58:37

Re: Is there a terminal out there for me?

#6 2006-02-09 15:04:43

Re: Is there a terminal out there for me?

#7 2006-02-09 15:32:34

Re: Is there a terminal out there for me?

#8 2006-02-09 16:45:25

Re: Is there a terminal out there for me?

#9 2006-02-09 17:11:48

Re: Is there a terminal out there for me?

#10 2006-02-09 17:38:23

Re: Is there a terminal out there for me?

#11 2006-02-09 17:40:15

Re: Is there a terminal out there for me?

#12 2006-02-09 17:52:24

Re: Is there a terminal out there for me?

#13 2006-02-10 08:30:14

Re: Is there a terminal out there for me?

#14 2006-02-10 16:23:40

Re: Is there a terminal out there for me?

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