I have recently installed Ubuntu Breezy. It's pretty awesome.
However, I have a problem. All the terminals on pretty much all modern Linux systems (Ubuntu, Debian, FC3/4, etc) are either broken or impossible to configure. I assumed that these issues would be fixed in the new distro, but they seem to be getting worse - I guess terminals are falling out of vogue.
xterm displays "ΓΏ" when I hit M-backspace, which should be "delete previous word". This is a keystroke I use a lot. It also corrupts the terminal by improperly interpreting a multibyte sequence as a single character for forward movement rather than backward movement.
gnome-terminal - crashes all the god damn time, for no reason I can discern. screws up Epic pretty regularly.
xterminal - this one is my favorite. It screws up my backspace key when I run screen locally. Emacs thinks I'm typing C-@, zsh and bash don't delete a character.
rxvt - least buggy of the bunch, and it looks like what I'll be using, but ... Xt-style scrollbars? no antialiased fonts? no interactive font selection? customization through X resources? Seriously.
Hey, maybe they could figure out a way to make me care about how many stop bits I'm using, that'd be so retro!
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5 days ago
6 comments:
Are these terminal problems, or shell problems? Hey, at least you're not stuck with cmd.exe. :)
All terminal problems. As far as I'm concerned, even the terminal works; it's just the programs that wrap the terminal which are brain-damaged.
See my next post :)
try konsole?
my main problem with xterm is that the scrollbars are hosed.
http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=17220 is the open bug report.
I realize you're now full of HATE, but here's a nice terminal roundup:
The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators
http://lwn.net/Articles/88161/
Also, it looks like you did not try Konsole; it may be worth it.
I've tried konsole a bunch of times; my experiences with it when it first came out were so bad that I never really considered it again. However, I did try it out again after receiving these suggestions and found that many of my remembered criticisms are still unfortunately valid. Here are my some problems with konsole that I found after about 15 minutes of use:
- Resize is pixel-at-a-time. You can't tell how many characters wide a terminal is when you're resizing it.
- When it starts, it randomly spits out X errors, that look like this:
X Error: BadDevice, invalid or uninitialized input device 169
Major opcode: 147
Minor opcode: 3
Resource id: 0x0
Failed to open device
That can't be good.
- Constantly complains about not being able to open .desktop files in /usr/share/apps - what's that about??
- There is a wide, ugly padding border around the edge of the window
- Qt. Ugh. I'm not going to install all of KDE and a gajillion megabytes of C++ libraries just so I can get a half-decent theme.
- Options don't persist without "save sessions profile" or "save as default" or something, which I cannot seem to remember to hit
- (also this is destructive and restoring to defaults is hard)
- C-s and C-q aren't used for flow control normally?
- Pseudotransparency is buggy as hell (effectively makes the terminal useless)
- Subjectively speaking, even slower than gnome-terminal; it appears to be the same speed as g-t with antialiasing on even when using a bitmapped font
The editor seems to have the opposite preference that I do with respect to scrollbars (Xaw scrollbars are the best? Huh what?)
but otherwise that is a pretty good review.
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