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Obligatory xterm Plug
Authored by: readparse on Apr 21, '03 02:01:57PM
I found iTerm a long time ago and liked the tab support, but for some reason it never replaced Terminal.app as my primary terminal application (as a unix guy who deals with lots of servers, my terminal application is probably my most commonly used application).

What DID replace Terminal.app for me was xterm, once Apple's X11 came out and I found the tip on this site about using antialiased OS X fonts in xterm. From that moment on, I have been free of Terminal's and iTerm's unbelievable slowness. xterm is a VERY solid terminal application that has many years under it's belt. There are a whole lot of options, all covered very well in the man page.

An example:

alias footerm='xterm -fa Monaco -fs 14 -background "#660000" -foreground "#F2F28C" -e ssh -X -l foouser foosite.com &

This is in my .bash_profile file (your shell may vary), and this alias allows me to type "footerm" and enter, and it opens up a new xterm window with my preferred font, with a dark red background (notice that it takes X11 color names or hex RGB values) and a light-colored font color. The "-e" switch tell it the command to run, so that command even starts my ssh connection. When I quit (or lose) the ssh connection, the window closes.

I have several of these set up, in different colors, so it's easy to tell which xterm window is which. The only thing missing is tab support, which is something that I really want, but which is NOT worth going to iTerm for, because apparently iTerm uses the same core terminal functionality as Terminal.app. You won't notice how unbelievably slow Terminal.app and iTerm.app are until you have used xterm religiously for a while. I am SERIOUSLY in the market for tabbed xterm, which would be simply awesome.

John

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Obligatory xterm Plug
Authored by: rselph on Apr 21, '03 02:16:48PM
I am SERIOUSLY in the market for tabbed xterm, which would be simply awesome.

If you have fink installed, you might want to try multi-gnome-terminal. I don't use it myself, but it sounds like what you are looking for.

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Obligatory xterm Plug
Authored by: restiffbard on Apr 21, '03 02:49:00PM

glad I'm not the only one that things terminal.app is ass slow.
haven't tried xterm on OS X yet though. certainly will now. coming
from linux i just couldn't get over the slowness of terminal.app



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Obligatory xterm Plug
Authored by: ClarkGoble on Apr 21, '03 04:15:31PM

I like a lot of the terminal programs available with Fink as well. The downside with them is that they don't support drag and drop. I use that a lot.

Speed just isn't that big a deal with Terminal for what I use it for. I guess I'm not hard enough of a user of the terminal. I'd tried iTerm a while back and can't remember why I stopped. I'll give it an other try and I did like the tabs in Gnome Term.



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Obligatory xterm Plug
Authored by: Aarden on Apr 22, '03 07:47:32AM

Another, prettier alternative is the KDE terminal, konsole. It comes
with the Fink package kdebase3.



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