Just when you thought terminal emulators couldn't get any better, Ghostty ships Ghostty is more interesting than it sounds, for several reasons: Who wrote it, what it does, and the language it was written in are all more unusual than the ostensibly simple task it performs. MIT-licensed Ghostty is a terminal emulator. In 2025, of course, lots of people never need a terminal emulator, and good for them. If …
Meh. I'll stick with Konsole, thanks.
Nice example of how to make something in Zig, though, but the idea of compile-time code execution gives me the heebie-jeebies a bit. (not that CMake, python etc can't be abused to do nasty things, but it just feels a little bit nondeterministic, in a "never-twice-the-same-binary" kind of a way)
GPU acceleration.. Sounds cool, until i'm trying to squeeze a process into limited VRAM
And it still uses.. GTK.. argh. Next!
GTK. . . I second that. Far more style than substance for my taste1.
Regarding ghostty, I installed on Ubuntu 24.10 under xfce4 and it does seem relatively quick. Whether it brings much more than that to the party is up for debate.
It would take an hour or so fiddling with configuration files and command line settings to whip it into what I'd consider shape, as inured as I am to xfce4-terminal with a side order of xterm2.
I suspect that the lack of a graphical configuration option will be a hindrance to adoption for a lot of folks and, for the nonce, I'm not sure it brings enough to the party for me to spend the time fussing with settings, especially considering the lack of a title bar, the presence of which I personally find useful3.
_________________
1 Your mileage may vary and I'm not going to say you're a bad person if it does.
2 I'd abandon xterm completely but xfce4-terminal doesn't support logfiles (xterm -lf logfile) as far as I can tell -- very useful IMHO for debugging long, complicated process output, especially tracebacks that aren't easily captured in another manner.
3 See footnote 1.
> 2 I'd abandon xterm completely but xfce4-terminal doesn't support logfiles (xterm -lf logfile) as far as I can tell -- very useful IMHO for debugging long, complicated process output, especially tracebacks that aren't easily captured in another manner.
FWIW, xfce4-terminal supports unlimited scrollback, and that can be either cut-and-pasted to a file, or saved directly from the terminal menu bar.
Understood -- I've done that but that adds extra steps when I'm repetitively testing something. I also find the scrollback very tweaky.
My preference is just to load the logfile into emacs, where I can search to my heart's delight.
Admittedly, my workflow is probably not the most modern on the block but it gets me there. . .
Konsole also supports unlimited scrollback (I set it to be a very-long fixed-length i.e. 20k lines - I have memory to burn, but I prefer it to be a known quantity that I am burning) and also saving to a file (menu -> save output as) as well as search/highlight within the window
I more often than not just do a big highlight-n-paste from the scroll buffer these days when I want to look through logging output (mate-terminal being my current preference, again because modern new versions of gnome-terminal have foolishly borked the M(enu) in WIMP with their rotting hamburgers), but might the typescript command perhaps also be of use when you need to save output somewhere for later peeking around in?
(Bah, why doesn't The Reg editor let me use kbd tags?)
I too will probably stick with Konsole. I clicked on the .deb to download it from Github and Discover kicked in and asked me if I wanted to install it and then start it. I am rocking Kubuntu at the moment.
The only reason I wont be sticking with Goshty is because it will not automatically update along with everything else, on an Ubuntu box. I have to worry about things like PCI DSS and Cyber Essentials Plus and co. I could integrate it myself eventually and that would be fine but I already have a few other projects that I do that for.
Ghostly is very pretty and very fast. I ran a very quick check:
# time tree /var
1559 directories, 25835 files
real 0m0.165s
user 0m0.088s
sys 0m0.076s
konsole gives similar results too. For a laugh I wont even bother trying to run dir in a Windows cmd.exe box. Windows does have a decent new terminal thingie but not for servers (wtf?)
I'm surprised that you needed to go to GitHub. Did `apt install konsole` (or indeed through Discover) not work on your Ubuntu box? Doing it that way instead of downloading straight from GitHub would probably be more compliant with the Cyber Security standards that you mentioned.
One of the best things about Debian and it's derivatives such as Ubuntu, is that you DON'T need to download software from untrusted/volatile* sources such as GitHub. It's all ready-packaged and thoroughly tested for you in the apt repository.
* by volatile, I mean that the GitHub version of any piece of software can be updated before it is tested, and "keep all software updated to its latest version" is a lazy mantra which should certainly never be extended to "development" versions.
> I'm surprised that you needed to go to GitHub. Did `apt install konsole` (or indeed through Discover) not work on your Ubuntu box?
You misread the comment.
@sedregj said that that they would "stick with Konsole". This means that they already have Konsole and plan to keep it.
Therefore the .deb that they were attempting to download cannot be for Konsole: they cannot keep something they do not yet have.
Obviously the .deb file that they were trying to install was for Ghostty.
I've installed it, and I'm comparing it to iTerm.
It is a little quicker, it feels snappier. However, some of the colour rendering of text when SSH'ing in to a server seems to be ignored by Ghostty. Obviously this is probably a setting I've not seen in the 5 minutes of testing, but it does feel different. And it feels different in a good way.
I had a go at installing the Ubuntu PPA version on Devuan, but dependencies didn't allow it. I have NoCSD installed to restore traditional controls to Gnome applications, and was interested to see if that worked.
However, being coded in an unusual language is a deal-breaker for me as far as adopting something for everyday productivity. Either the language or the application will fall into disuse.
Everybody dies ;)
I think Zig is different. As long as it gets to an actual release soon it occupies a highly unique position amongst the "new" languages. I'm not a fanboy so I won't preach, but there is very little hype and a lot of good work going into it.
FWIW the Ubuntu packages won't install on my Debian system, and I can't be bothered to install the dependencies & build myself, so I'll have to take the word of others here if the TE is any good!
> or Opencore Legacy Patcher...
TBH, that is the plan, yes.
The thing is that I'm perfectly happy with Monterey and there's nothing I want in newer releases. I only upgraded to macOS 12 last year because of the moving system requirements of Chrome and Firefox; I was perfectly happy on Mojave, and moving meant that I had to lose MS Word 2011. I was able to get an upgrade to Office 2016 which successfully upgraded Word to a 64-bit version, which left Excel, PowerPoint, etc. unusable, because they were still 32-bit. Which was fine by me: I deleted them. I only want Word for Outline Mode, and have no need for the rest: LibreOffice is perfectly fine for what I occasionally do in an office suite.
But because I left upgrading to macOS 12 so late, I only got a couple of updates before macOS 15 came out, meaning that 12 fell off the update cycle. Now only 13 and 14 get updates.
Or maybe time to practice what he preaches and install a new open-source OS on it
May I suggest a firmware-included "netinst" image, selecting none of the "tasksel" package lists, and then installing the packages he actually needs as he needs them
I usually start with "apt install xserver-xorg nvidia-driver kde-plasma-desktop" and that is enough to get from the barebones base system to a usable desktop
> Or maybe time to practice what he preaches and install a new open-source OS on it
I am painfully aware.
I do have a fleet of laptops running various distros and FOSS OSes, plus two more current, faster, work laptops.
However, the iMac is *much* more pleasant to use. I don't like trackpads and I hate chiclet keyboards. That makes all modern laptops a PITA to use.
The problem is this: I have a 27" Retina display plus a 27" Thunderbolt display. The latter is 1/4 of the resolution. I can't see the difference: they look identical to me, and the Thunderbolt display is gorgeous and I do not wish to replace it.
*All* the good FOSS desktops use X11 and only X11.
Only a small handful support Wayland: currently, officially and fully, GNOME and KDE. I detest both.
Unofficially and partially, LXQt and Cinnamon.
I don't like either of them.
This is also why I don't actually run the copy of Asahi Linux on my M1 MacBook Air.
And most recently, Xfce -- in a version too new to be in any mainstream distro yet. That would be the only tolerable option, and even so, it is going to look very ugly on my sleek beautiful iMac.
> May I suggest a firmware-included "netinst" image, selecting none of the "tasksel" package lists, and then installing the packages he actually needs as he needs them
No thank you. Life is much too short for Debian.
> I usually start with "apt install xserver-xorg nvidia-driver kde-plasma-desktop" and that is enough to get from the barebones base system to a usable desktop
I don't own anything with an nVidia GPU that is recent enough to run Wayland at all.
KDE is not a usable desktop, in my not remotely humble opinion. It is a sad ugly travesty of the desktop of one of the worst versions of Windows: Windows 98.
(Windows ME and Vista both _looked_ better than Windows 98. Vista even worked better, after SP1.)
The M1 MBA has Asahi and therefore KDE 6, and it is so appallingly bad compared to macOS that when I upgraded it to Asahi 41, I was reduced to helpless laughter at how terrible KDE is. It is an ugly broken useless joke.
GNOME, in contrast, is a _beautiful_ broken _even more useless_ joke.
> And this is why widespread "Linux on the desktop" is, and will always be, 20 years off...
Not true, as I've written before.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/18/linux_desktop_debate/
ChromeBooks outsell Macs -- in revenue terms, not in numbers. Since the average Chromebook is about £200 and the average Mac is more like £1000, this implies that they're outselling Macs by somewhere around 5x to 10x.
ChromeOS is Linux. Hundreds of millions of people use Linux on the desktop. They just don't know that they do, which is the way it should be. They shouldn't have to.
But I want a bit more from my desktop computers than ChromeOS, and I think that's fair too.
I think you misunderstand my point.
As you note above there are many different window managers, and several different X servers. Everyone I know has similar feelings to you, offer them a choice of Window managers and you get some variant on "I detest both". Offer a choice of distros, you'll hear "Life is much too short for Debian"., etc.
There's really no such thing as "Linux on the desktop", there are hundreds of combinations of Linuxes on desktops. Everyone has their own favorite, which they then customize even further (I do). Every so often someone decides "This is wayyyy too complex, let's make a single, simple one that everyone can use", and what happens? "I want a bit more from my desktop computers than ChromeOS". The result is XKCD. Rinse and repeat.
I've been using X-window desktops for 40-odd years, on VMS, SunOS, Solaris and multiple Linuxes. All different, all continuously changing, largely for the old reason "because you can". We may all grumble about Windows, but the reason it is, and IMHO will remain, the most widely-used desktop is because it's largely consistent. You can go to pretty much any recent Windows system & make it work, without having to figure out which window button means what, or how to bring up a menu, or where the file manager is etc.
As you say yourself, most people don't care about a desktop "which is the way it should be. They shouldn't have to.". They might get that on one platform from a specific Linux desktop, like ChromeOS, but certainly not from any generalised "Oh, it just runs Linux" setup, because there isn't one.
Or, you know, maybe I understand your point well but I disagree with it. :-)
> As you note above there are many different window managers
Yes.
> and several different X servers.
No. There's one, these days. In the 20th century there were several proprietary ones, plus XFree86. Then for a short while there was XFree86 and X.org. Now, there's just X.org.
I am not absolutely certain but I think that the X11 servers on NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD are all forks of X.org, regularly synced with upstream. Only OpenBSD seems to really make the X server a thing with Xenocara.
> Everyone I know has similar feelings to you, offer them a choice of Window managers and you get some variant on "I detest both". Offer a choice of distros, you'll hear "Life is much too short for Debian"., etc.
Yup. So?
The thing is: give people freedom of choice and the result is inevitably lots of conflicting opinions.
That's not a bad thing.
> There's really no such thing as "Linux on the desktop", there are hundreds of combinations of Linuxes on desktops.
Yes, but it is possible to construct a cladogram, and at the root, there's 1 kernel, a single-digit number of libc implementations (most specialised), and quite possibly a single-digit number of packaging tools.
This is a heretical statement and would alienate thousands of people, but I think the distro landscape would be healthier and more interesting if all the corporate distros restricted themselves to a single desktop environment each, and put all their efforts into improving each of their tools. Currently things are spread far too thin.
SUSE, KDE, because although it owns Ximian and has GNOME fans, there is a deep history there.
Red Hat: GNOME.
Ubuntu -- well, it did once, Unity, but now? How about UKUI? It is largely unique to Ubuntu and it's pretty good.
Mint: Cinnamon.
Debian: Xfce. It's the one closest to its goals.
Arch: gods know. Some tiling thing, probably.
Solus should probably merge with SerpentOS, so Budgie.
And so on.
I can hear the screams of anguish already. :-D
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> the Thunderbolt display is gorgeous and I do not wish to replace it.
I don't know if you've tried, but a (Dell) Thunderbolt display worked out-of-the-box for me on Debian/KDE (with both Dell and Lenovo laptops). See this guide for the technically-unconfident, but you shouldn't need it. And i'm using Xorg, NOT Wayland.
> Life is much too short for Debian.
Sad when people say that. There is nothing to sneer at about learning a "powerful" OS that doesn't patronise the user by hiding away its inner workings lest they run away in fear. I expect better from The Register's "OSes" reporter.
> KDE is not a usable desktop, in my not remotely humble opinion. It is a sad ugly travesty of the desktop of one of the worst versions of Windows: Windows 98.
So I see, it's all about the looks for you then. Of course, KDE is highly customisable/themable. My Konsole looks exactly like your GhosTTY - black and borderless, I use the alt key and left/right mousebutton to move/resize it, and shift+left/right to change tabs. That's my preference, but all completely configurable. Or is it just because it has a "Start Menu" you don't like it? You can turn that off too and have it look like a Mac with a launcher bar if you want. Don't dismiss something just because it it is customisable so you have to use a braincell to browse some menus and work out how to customise it. That's your actual Job, isn't it?
BTW you forgot your gimp suit
I agree with you on GNOME though, except the "beautiful" bit. To me, functionality is beauty when it comes to Operating Systems. A computer is a tool, not a gilded mother-of-pearl vanity mirror.
What a baffling comment, @cyberdemon. As far as I can see, every single point of mine that you respond to is a misinterpretation. That's quite an achievement.
> I don't know if you've tried, but a (Dell) Thunderbolt display worked out-of-the-box for me on Debian/KDE
Er, no. I mean, I am sure that is correct but it's irrelevant. I want to keep the Apple display I have got and use it connected to the iMac with which I bought it.
No, I do not want to chuck the 10YO iMac and keep the 14YO screen.
But as an aside: I have tried to use it with other computers, with no success at all, even to the extent of buying not one but two different USB-C Thunderbolt to old-Thunderbolt adapters.
I wrote about the problem of the lack of Thunderbolt backwards-compatibility here:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/20/displayport_revision_usb/
> Sad when people say that. There is nothing to sneer at about learning a "powerful" OS that doesn't patronise the user by hiding away its inner workings lest they run away in fear. I expect better from The Register's "OSes" reporter.
In my humble personal opinion, the Ubuntu family of OSes are less work than Debian. (Although this is on the threshold of changing.) Several of the choices made by Debian over the years are questionable or bad in several different ways.
I am not an especial fan of systemd, but many others feel strongly about it. As such, the decision to adopt systemd caused a project fork. That was disastrous mis-management.
* Firmware: the fact that it took until "Bookworm" to include firmware was shameful.
* Init systems: It is now over a decade since Devuan was announced:
https://www.theregister.com/2014/12/01/ttsystemdtt_row_ends_with_debian_getting_forked/
It is now up to version 5:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/21/devuan_5_systemdfree_debian/
That was a catastrophic failure of project management. Whether they think the reasons are compelling or not, anything that causes a significant fraction of your contributors or users to split the community is a mistake. When the mistake lasts a decade, that means you've fscked up.
I remember many tech débacles over the decades in Linux: the libc4 to libc5/glibc one, the XFree86 -> X.org one, the GCC/EGCS split. All got resolved. Everyone moved to glibc and now the fact that some projects are choosing musl instead is a healthy sign that people are willing to experiment. XFree86 ended up fading away as everyone moved. EGCS became the new GCC.
The Debian project has failed to resolve the Devuan issue after _over a decade._ That is a failure.
* Browsers: the whole Iceweasel etc. thing was pretty poorly handled but Mozilla is perhaps even more to blame, and not for the first time. Now, the slow updates of ESR browsers and the frankly lousy handling of uninstalling the default browser, are serious problems, but Debian has failed to even register there is a problem.
When I have to write an article with instructions of how to fix a leading project, as I did her, that should be a scandal.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/10/debian_firefox_issues/
Note the problem in the penultimate paragraph. I reported this on Stack Overflow and was told I was wrong, even when I gave the steps to reproduce it. This is infuriating and it does not give me an incentive to get more involved, stand for DPL and fix it. Instead it encourages me to go find a distro that fixes it.
I have and will continue to recommend Debian _based_ distros. It's a crying shame that the Raspberry Pi Desktop hasn't been updated -- it was great. MX Linux is great. siduction is great if you need what it does. If you don't, Spiral Linux is pretty good: it's a better Debian just as the same developer's Gecko Linux is a better openSUSE.
But Debian itself is obstructive, just as it has been since I first tried it in about 1997 or so.
> So I see, it's all about the looks for you then.
You do not see at all. It is not the looks at all. If it were I would not use and recommend Xfce.
But saying that, KDE has been as ugly as sin since KDE 2.0.
I used and recommended KDE 1.0, and it wasn't ugly, it was just plain. Plain is fine.
A friend of mine is a film score composer. He has done some big name films. He told me something interesting: that his job is to be unnoticeable. If you notice the incidental music in a film, then the composer has failed, he said. It should set emotion and tone without itself being noticeable. It is fine to occasionally come to the front and shine, and some of the greats such as John Williams have done that splendidly... but 90% of their best work, you never notice.
OS themes should be like that. It is acceptable to occasionally do something beautiful that shines, but mostly, if the user notices it, then that is a failure.
Since it stopped being my desktop of choice, I have run and evaluated KDE 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. All were ugly, to varying degrees. 4.5 was the worst (by general acclaim) and at least by going flat 5.x fixed that, but it's still unpleasant to look at, in my view.
The _only_ time KDE looked good was Red Hat Linux's Bluecurve theme:
https://www.linuxcompatible.org/review/fedora-core-2/page-2/
It so infuriated some KDE developers that RH wanted to make KDE look good and ship it with best-of-breed apps such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice, that at least one RH KDE dev quit:
https://marc.info/?l=kde-devel&m=103293985032408
That tells you all you need to know about the KDE team.
> Of course, KDE is highly customisable/themable.
False claim.
My objections to KDE are about its function. I detailed some of my objections when 6 came out:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/29/kde_plasma_60_released/
The art of design and of project leadership consists of making people work together and cooperate. In a desktop, that means, as an example, _one_ default file manager, _one_ text editor, _one_ calculator, _one_ image viewer, etc. If Team A demands functions P, Q and R, and Team B demands functions X, Y and Z, then the management mediates between those teams and ensures that features P-R _and_ X-Y all are in the same app.
But KDE does not do that and it has not for 25Y now. The signs are everywhere (but KDE fans ignore them).
* Two "help/about" menu entries
* Two menu styles: menu bar _and_ hamburger. I want the ability to choose. There is no such option.
* Two version numbering schemes: release number + decimal, or date. I need to compare. Maximum one. Fix it.
* Start menu style: I think, from memory, there are 3. This is unacceptable. Fix it. Combine them.
* Taskbar button style: I think there are again 3. Bad, wrong, broken. Fix it.
* It claims to be user configurable. Very well, here are the config options I want:
- tabbed title bars, like BeOS, Zera, Haiku, ZevenOS
- a single panel spanning all my screens, like with old nVidia multihead on Windows
- vertical title bars on the left edge, like wm2/dwm
- a global option to disable client side decorations, like NoCSD: https://github.com/PCMan/gtk3-nocsd
- a global option to disable hamburger menus or move them to a global menu
- repositioning panels by drag-and-drop with no dialog boxes
- a tool like Xfce "Panel Preferences" to switch desktop layouts with 1 click
- a global keyboard UI that is as compatible with MS Windows as possible. When I press Alt-space, X then I expect that window to maximise, as it does on most Gtk desktops.
Hint: all of these are available in rival projects. None of them are available in KDE.
There are umpteen start menus, program switchers, text editors, etc. but those are trivial cosmetics. The important stuff is not there.
I _do_ want a customisable desktop, but KDE, despite its marketing, offers _less_ than rivals such as Xfce.
Translation: KDE's claims of customisability are not true.
> My Konsole looks exactly like your GhosTTY
It is not about how it looks.
When scanning through log files you don't need comprehension or retention. Frequently you can just look at the shape of the text and spot if it suddenly goes abnormal - eg pages of stack traces or error messages at the start of the line,
Other times it is the speed of the console rendering that actually slows down a noisy build tool, a console using less CPU and rendering more efficiently might actually make the build run faster.
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One of the first things I do to any new installation is hang a so-called "dumb terminal" off a serial port[0] and send it a login.
It's kinda handy when the GUI goes TITSUP[1], although that's very rare today (outside the development boxen).
Just to make things more eccentric, I usually login as "write", which uses vi[2] as my shell ... When I'm doing serious writing, I don't need or want the bells and whistles of a GUI.
[0] Before you say it, ask yourself "what does the S in USB stand for?"
[1] Total Inability To Show the Usual Pr0n^H^H^Hictures
[2] elvis ... try it, you might like it.
Ahhh...but does it support the DG 6053 control characters?
DG purposely made their terminals incompatible with the VT-100 control characters so people would have to buy their terminals.
Crosstalk IV was my fave emulator back in the day...it had the nicest file download integration.
I never had any problem quitting vi. Helped by a local support group and weekly meetings, I've been clean now for ten years.
More seriously, the fact that the Ed editor on the Amiga shared many of the same interface paradigms as vi meant that when I encountered the latter, I wasn't completely blindsided (and yes, was able to figure out how to exit, and even use it productively too.)
"I tried vi once ..."
Exactly my experience actually. I tried vi back in 1992 or so and found myself looking at a blank screen with a blinking cursor. It let me type stuff and echoed it on the screen, but discovery of what to do if I wanted to do more than type was entirely lacking. Like you I ended up killing it with the power button. Of course, vi discoverability is much better now days. But the few times I've tried it because it promised some nifty capability, it looked usable, but the nifty capability turned out to do something that wasn't quite what I needed. So, I continue to use emacs. The good news. Emacs has great discoverability and configurability. The bad news. Many configuration changes require writing lisp code. Lisp is not even remotely my favorite programming language,
“ Rather than emulating some physical terminal that nobody has manufactured in decades, Ghostty emulates xterm itself, the grandparent of all terminal emulators for Unix-like OSes.”
It’s interesting how having effectively rebranded VT102 as xterm, people forget there was a world before xterm. Although my memories of played with termcaps, tell me it is a good thing the world has moved on.
(1)https://www.x.org/archive/X11R6.7.0/doc/xterm.1.html
Who in their right mind uses Tek4014 graphics modes any more? I remember playing around with these in the '80s, but haven't done so for years (did you know that there was a di-troff backend that would proof a ducument on a Tek4014 terminal or emulation?)
Things like GNU R still support this graphics mode, but it's much better to render into an X11 window nowadays.
My concern is that there is not just one xterm. It changed through the ages, and the xterm from before X11R5 differs from that shipped at X11R5, and also X11R6 and later.
Nothing hugely changed (all subsets of ANSI X3.64 or ISO/IEC 6429) but the adoption of ISO8859 character sets, and in later variants, UTF8 means that other character set support changed, which often means that things like box draw characters don't work.
Later xterms actually started introducing some VT220 features, and this became the base, not VT102, including changed function key strings. VT1XX and 2XX keyboards has some strange issues, like F1-F4 being mapped to PF1-PF4 above the numeric keypad, and on VT2X0s, there not being an F5 that could be used, although this was fixed (I believe) in VT320s and later. It was very common to use VT220s in VT100 mode, because otherwise you didn't have an Escape key, something rather important when using on UNIX-like OSs.
Another thing that stared to be introduced was colour handling commands, something that neither VT102s nor VT220s could do. I think that most UNIX vendors standardised on the VT240 command sets and colours, but these may actually differ from those provided by ANSI.SYS on the old Windows command.com, which proliferated from the DOS/Windows PC world.
There are a couple of escape sequences that appear rather patchy in some implementations. For example, the new Windows Terminal on Windows 10 and 11 do not implement terminfo capabilities flash, dim, invis, il, dl, mir or in correctly while still proclaiming to be fully xterm256 compliant (or at least they didn't last time I looked). il and dl are quite important with BSD derrived versions of VI.
This becomes much more significant when you consider using these emulators with UNIX-like systems that have had a long history, and thus have several xterm related terminfo entries.
I would actually like a new global definition that ditched the historical baggage of xterm (but still keeping with the general ISO/IEC 6429 command set), which could be made common across all system types, providing a defined standard subset of the total set of commands.
We forget that ISO8859 (and related standards), UTF8 and Unicode (UTF-16) were being developed/ratified in parallel to X11R5, and thus after the first iterations of xterm.
For my sysadmin purposes, I’ve found a VT52 emulation sufficient to access network appliances et al.
Having designed a major system in 1989 that had standardised on VT240, I’ve often wondered whether modern largescale user applications have continued to use similar rich terminal access or developers decided a web interface or windows app was more “now”.
> For my sysadmin purposes, I’ve found a VT52 emulation sufficient
ADM-3(A) for me, please!
(I had several. One was an honest no-A model (not a favorite).)
Luscious styling, clear font, satisfactory keyboard. High-hours CRTs did get a bit blurry and burned. Perfect fit behind the seat of a 1967 Mustang.
I do not understand 'terminals' dominated by a rainbow. Amber is the all-purpose text color.
> ADM-3(A)
Had a familiar ring so looked it up, my local college had one these connected to an acoustic coupler, as the replacement for the ageing and very noisy Teletype Model 33’s then in wide use across the campus, I was studying for my computing O level at the time.
Seem to remember the text was a bit blurry, but it definitely wasn’t amber, more bluish grey
I can take credit for the APL version of Data General's D200.
I think they may even have sold one or two.
MC6802 assembly code FTW. I was on the team that designed it. Wrote the keyboard scanning code and the entire mod to support the APL character set with overstruck characters.
It even has a mode where you can download 6800 assembly (S1/S9) and run programs out of display RAM. It was a more trusting and civilised time...
I wrote one myself once, thinking "how hard can it be". Turned out that a VT52 emulator running on a BBC Micro and written in BASIC was only good enough to cope with 300 baud data. Which was fine.
Because this makes me an expert, I will say that it was always tough to do on early hardware. 132 columns? Errr.. not quite. Come up with a way to sensibly map the LK201 keyboard to a PC? We'll give it a go.. what's a COMPOSE key anyway? I thought using a VT520 was a treat.. multisession, copy and paste *between* sessions, fitted on the desk easily and had no moving parts.
Spare a thought for the people who wrote the code for the actual VT52 - the extremely primitive CPU couldn't even add or subtract (except by 1) and yet it managed to keep up at 9600 baud - unless you had the optional damp tissue printer, in which case it had to resort to XON/XOFF during some printing operations.
But of the operations that a VT52 could do, the only ones that really needed arithmetic were the screen addressable cursor commands (the VT52 was really quite a simple terminal). Everything else could be handled with simple increment and decrement commands.
As I understand it, the 'CPU' of a VT52, if you could call it that, was created in TTL, and was not a microprocessor at all. This meant that there were probably specific operations to do what was needed to implement the simple command set, and nothing else.
Adrian Black has just finished bringing an obscure terminal back to life, and that uses discrete logic rather than a microprocessor. Great series of videos, although he hasn't yet had time to remove the "cataract" from the picture tube so the display is quite hazy.
It certainly wasn't a microprocessor - too early. It was a weird kind of hybrid. There were registers and register-to-memory operations and increment and decrement operations and conditional jumps (pretty much the bare minimum to be Turing complete). But some of the instructions decoded to direct operations on the hardware. So it lay somewhere on the spectrum between processor and washing machine controller.
I did exactly the same (BBC Micro, VT52) and found that with the correct implementation of XON/XOFF handshaking with suitable buffer thresholds (the way that you could configure DTR/DTR or RTS/CTS with the 5 pin implementation of RS423 on the BBC Micro made hardware handshaking a bit of an art, depending on the computer it was attached to) could achieve 2400 baud fairly reliably.
As I was always intending to code it in machine code, and the Basic version was really just a prototype, I did not worry too much about the speed. Once coded in 6502 assembler, my implementation could keep up with 9600 baud. It would run 19200 as well, but even with handshaking, this became unreliable.
I also implemented the full alternate character set for VT52 (apparently available as an Advanced Video add-on to the VT52), so was able to use it, albeit with some function key issues, with the SYSTIME SYSTEL transaction monitor that we used for teaching transaction based applications, and also with some of the more advanced features of the BSD Ingres implementation.
I also coded a Tek4010 impolementation in BBC Basic, but didn't do that in assembler or do a Tek4014 or VT100, as by that time we had Kermit and other terminal emulators (Computer Concepts Communicator, Acornsoft Termulator to name a few) available.
Ah, Kermit. Used that on a luggable as my regular terminal for what seems like years but probably wasn't. It did get me used to working with small TE windows for years. Nowadays they need to be a bit bigger but at the time several xterms open at once or several of some other TE working in Windows.
CoolTerm (cross platform) is also written in BASIC and is what I ended up using when I had to persuade a Mac to connect to a serial device on the USB port.
The BASIC is Xojo, it looks like the old VB6 and VB6 programs can be converted to it.
I want it to go slow! Well, just one bit: the bit that (hopefully) accurately emulates the hardware smooth scroll capability of a VT terminal. I shall install on the Mac when I get home later and try it out.
But, on the subject of speed, I did go to the linked blog on Zig and quite liked how easy it was to write code that explicitly takes advantage of SIMD instructions rather than rely on the compiler's optimiser to work it out. (Caveat: I stopped writing C professionally years back so maybe C/C++ now has some sort of compiler directive to make it equally easy?)
At work we've been told to use Termius (because it can share host configs between a team, handy if there's more than one of you), and while most of it is just 'fine' (and it's certainly not written for speed), the one feature it has that I love is that if you open multiple sessions in a single window, you can broadcast the same input to all the machines at once. Very handy if you need to run the same command(s) on quite a lot machines at once, (but a small enough number to not to justify writing a script or whatever.)
Weeeeellllllll.
Being pedantic here, you could write a terminal emulator in X11 intrinsic operations without using anything beyond the initial tool kits (Xt?) that shipped with X11, but that would be a rather hair shirt experience.
If you look at xterm from X11R3 or earlier (which I believe used XTK), then they are ugly as sin (but this could mainly be because of the poor resolution of displays at the time, and the relatively crude fonts that were available by default), but were functional.
Try firing up a real xterm (not the terminal emulators shipped with your desktop), and you will still see some of this ugliness, but as some distros no longer install it, you may have to pull it from the repositories.
I use the stock Mac Terminal, but I also use vi as an editor and this is a problem(*). So I've tried iTerm2, which largely worked until it hung, requiring a force-quit which killed all my terminals - my iTerm2 experiment ended at precisely that point. I've also tried a few others (Kitty, Alacritty) but had various problems that forced me to abandon them.
Ghostty so far looks ok, fixes that issue and certainly feels fast... but no scrollbar. Sigh. My search for the "Moon Under Water" of macOS terminals will continue...
(*) Set login shell to zsh, then: open new terminal, run "vi", then :q to close, reopen "vi" with any file of more than one line, press down arrow, press ^Z to suspend, now press ^C - you should break to a new line in your terminal, but you don't - Ctrl-C is disabled. You can fix it with "trap -", but after 30 years of muscle memory this is a real ballache. An issue since at least 2019, reported in 2022, cock-all achieved.
PS. someone was asking about "traditional window furniture" above. Edit the config to add "macos-titlebar-style = native", does the trick.
Where is the sidebar remote servers which can be put in a tree, the macros, the file transfer, the password manager, the detachable tabs, the ssh tunnel configuration, the remote server status in the status bar, the paste that stops you pasting multiple lines into production by accident, etc...?
It works fine but it's like working with one arm tied behind your back.
Not only is there a pretty technical review of a terminal emulator ('a term...what?' ask the great unwashed) but it raises 40-plus comments from the readership in 5 hours. Most of which combine comments about *their* preferred emulator being an art-form with a declaration that GNOME, X or just Linux itself is the work of the devil incarnate. I'm just missing references to systemd - but give it time! ;)
I believe developer Kovid Goyal is also the sole developer of Calibre, which is the absolute best app around for handling ebooks, including format conversion. I use Calibre for all ebook management, because it is the best and it runs on all my computers, whether they run Linux, macOS or even Windows.
Its UI is _awful_, though.
However, I don't need much functionality from a terminal emulator. So I won't switch just for functionality or performance. There, it's all about UI for me.
Ah, I'm glad I'm not the only one who loves Calibre but struggles with its UI.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not one of those superficial form-over-function types who wants everything to be skeuomorphic or artfully pale-grey-on-white with vast areas of unused space. But Calibre's UI is unnecessarily awkward, which is a shame because it's such an amazing tool for converting and editing e-books.
Just started using it. I've used wezterm on Linux, kitty and iTerm2 on macOS. It's pretty solid and I really like the idea that it will be fully multiplatform later (Mitchell's committed to bringing in Windows, not just WSL). Now using it on both Linux and macOS.
I tried Alacritty - but it doesn't do tabs. And, as much as I like kitty, its lead is a tad too opinionated about things like tmux or how to pick emojis. Wezterm is a solid contender, but I like Ghostty's focus on simplicity of configuration (just key-value pairs). Wezterm's Lua config is something I could get into, if I had to, but I'd rather not. One thing that turned me off iTerm2 was its overcomplex GUI-driven configuration options.
The support for themes is also quite elegant, with a nice preview mechanism.
For a 1.0, very good. Bit glitchy with backspace handling in SSH sessions. And it very much will need a scrollbar, as another commenter pointed out. I also couldn't figure out how to launch it with individual configuration flags defined on the command line - which you are supposed to be able to do -, but either that's just immature or I just had a brainfart moment and missed how to do it.
IMHO, a terminal's job mostly is to be able to receive sufficient configuration to be usable, quickly and without much effort. And then be robust and quick and get out of the way. Ghostty seems to manage that well and the ability to use the same configuration on multiple OSs is neat for those of us who value that.
I often use Cool Retro Term for preference - no, really - something about the amber text and scanlines puts me "in the zone" for terminal work. The CRT distortion, noise, flicker, and other visual effects are fun but perhaps not for long-term serious use :)
Yes, yes, I know. I am clearly weird and deranged and should be shunned.
I compiled it instead and to me other than the fact that it has a config file, this brings nothing new or that I even have a need for. Split term windows? Yeah, Terminator already does that LONG AGO!
A toy? Yes! Anything to call home about? Absolutely NOT!
It's not the TTY that makes the admin/dev good or bad. As long as you can type shit and get shit back, that's all for me.
There isn't a Debian version available for download. The Ubuntu one's don't work for Debian. "Package libglib2.0-0t64 is not installed." Looked at the source version, it said to install some packages `sudo apt install libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev git`, maybe `sudo apt install gcc-multilib` , and then "Zig 0.13 is required.". But Zig didn't have a Debian version as well. So um...
Ended up trying out the snap versions instead...
# snap install zig --classic --beta # optional?
snap install --edge ghostty --classic
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