Re: [dwm] pterm - yet another good terminal.

On Fri, Sep 28, 2007 at 03:57:19PM -0400, John A. Grahor wrote:
> I'm using pterm. It is part of recent unix versions of Putty.
>
> Putty, if you were unaware, is a very good terminal+telnet&ssh client
> originally developed for Windows. It is free software with a very liberal
> license.
>
> Recently they have added a unix port which provides all the Windows
> functionality plus a stripped down program called pterm which just provides
> the terminal capability without the telnet or the ssh client.
>
> I recommend it to you all because it works properly in the context of a
> tiling WM like dwm. I.E., you can run dwm in the fully tiled mode (with no
> spaces between the windows). It is VERY very fast, faster than the version
> of rxvt that is installed on my machine. It depends only on GTK 1.x. I
> doesn't have to be "installed"; once built you can run it from anywhere. I
> have it in ~/bin/.
>

Really interesting, I didn't know about pterm and am testing it just
now.

> And Anselm, although I haven't had the time to dive into it, it appears to
> implement your idea of a separating the terminal functionality from the
> ptty. For each instance of the terminal it runs two processes.
>

The man page doesn't mention any similar feature. Though I don't know
because with Ctrl + RightMouseButton you get a menu (not mentioned in
the man page) which lets you duplicate a session. It seems it just
opens another term but I'm not sure.

> Also, it has a feature that for me is invaluable. It will run in "line"
> mode. That is, you can set it up to collect input until you hit <CR> and
> then it will send the whole line to the ptty. I have a bunch of hosts
> around the world I log into via ssh over horribly slow satellite links and
> ssh doesn't support line mode like telnet does.
>

I still prefer the hold mode of 9term (with the editing capabilities it
has lets you to use 9term plus cat - > or ed as a full featured visual
text editor).

> I don't know how pterm handles UTF8 et al but would be interested to know
> what you all think.
>

It looks that it supports UTF-8 without problems if you use the -cs 'UTF-8'
option, though it doesn't support non fixed width fonts (it displays
them wrongly instead of reporting an error).
Another bug I found is that man pages (i.e. less) doesn't get updated when
the window is resized (a C-L solves it).
The compiled version in archlinux occupies 396K, which seems a bit big
to me, but it could be due to Gtk stuff. Surely, I will have a look at
the source code this weekend (if I have some free time...).

Thanks for the news, John,

--
yiyus || JGL