There is not a good terminal for use with Mac OS X, as far as I can tell.
Terminal.app doesn't let me redefine the RGB values of the colors, so I'm stuck with their horribly dark blue. Worse, it uses bold fonts for bold colors, when they should really just be bright. (I belive that 10.2's lousy Terminal.app actually had an option for this, and it was done away with.) It's not an xterm, so it doesn't do xterm magic. (I am sorely missing being able to have the Perl debugger pop open a new terminal to debug forked processes -- this despite having only learned about it today.)
iTerm is insane. Sometimes it just starts using huge amounts of memory or CPU. I'm told it's slow, but it hasn't usually been so slow that I notice. I actually don't like its tabbing feature, but it lets me redefine colors, and it doesn't bold terminal text. It has some kind of "double-click to open URLs" thing, but it sucks, never works, and often tries to open http://%20/ when I'm just trying to re-focus my term.
xterm is xterm, but its copy and paste interacts poorly with the rest of the OS. Dieter showed me how to make it work sometimes today: remap a key to "insert" and then use shift-insert. This works when command-V and the Edit menu don't... but I have no convenient key to remap on my laptop, and hitting shift-insert is a pain in the butt to begin with. The fonts are ugly, too.
Sometimes I wish I was still running Linux.
Sometimes I wish I was still running Linux.
That's one of the reasons I switched back from Mac OS X to Linux.
Re:LinuxPPC!
rjbs on 2005-09-09T01:45:43
I need to make a big PRO and CON chart. I like iTunes, I like OmniWeb and OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle -- but these days I use them less and less. I like NetNewsWire (but Sage looks nice).
QuickSilver is fantastic, but I don't use it much anymore, except to launch...
Sigh!Re:LinuxPPC!
chromatic on 2005-09-09T06:21:21
For me, the ability to upgrade every program on my box at my convenience, when I see fit, the ability to install almost any program I could ever want with a single command-line interface, virtual desktops, focus follows mouse, X11 apps that integrate with the rest of the system, and the source code for absolutely everything available and unencumbered was too much to resist... at least once open drivers existed for all of my hardware.
Re:LinuxPPC!
sigzero on 2005-09-09T14:04:19
Do you like the LinuxPPC? Which distro do you use?Re:LinuxPPC!
chromatic on 2005-09-10T20:54:24
LinuxPPC is pretty handy. It's a lot faster than Mac OS X (even on the same hardware) and it's fairly easy to keep up to date. I use Gentoo, but I'm willing to try Ubuntu.
My only niggle hardware-wise right now is that I have to mute and unmute the volume manually to reset the sound outupt after waking up from sleep. Everything else -- hardware accelerated video, DVD playing, headphones, USB, hardware suspend , internal modem -- just works.
Well, sure, if you use their preset. But you can dial in any color you want for a custom screen.Terminal.app doesn't let me redefine the RGB values of the colors, so I'm stuck with their horribly dark blue.
Re:Color redef
rjbs on 2005-09-09T17:06:54
"You can do this" is not helpful without "and here's how." Do you just mean the useless-to-me "foreground color" settings? I want to change the meaning of/each/ color. In iTerm, I map my colors to a set that I like. Re:Color redef
merlyn on 2005-09-10T14:12:03
Not sure why you're not seeing it. I have Terminal.app window open. I go to the "Terminal/Window Settings..." menubar item (right next to preferences). This gives me a preferences box that has a popup list (Shell/Processes/Emulation/...). One of the options is "Color". There, I see a popup with "Black on White", "White on Black" and a few others. Below that is four color samples of "Cursor", "Selected", "Normal Text", "Bold Text" and a bit further down, "background color". Any one of those can be clicked and altered with a color picker at-will, which will change the combination to "custom" instead of what I picked.You're not seeing this?
Re:Color redef
rjbs on 2005-09-10T14:52:58
These let me set defaults for foreground, background, bold, and selected text. This is not what I want.
I want to be able to say, "when some application running in this terminal wants to display color 5, use #0af3e0."Re:Color redef
minaguib on 2005-11-08T04:03:49
You want TerminalColors
As for copying and pasting, here's what I do. To copy from X, just highlight the text and hit cmd-C, just like in any other OS X application. To paste text from the clipboard into X, click the mouse button while holding the option key down. Other things might work if you've got a fancier mouse. At the office I've got a Logitech wheel mouse, and I can paste into X by clicking the mouse wheel.
If you generally want a good terminal emulator, forget xterm (and aterm). Try urxvt (alias rxvt-unicode).
I have no idea how well it integrates into OS X, though.
Re:use iTerm
rjbs on 2005-09-26T09:51:19
I gave it a go, but it didn't seem that great. It seemed to ignore the "don't bold" preference (it just wouldn't save it, and I found no relevant plist entry.) It had some other random issues, too, that I meant to mention immediately, but I got distracted and now can't recall. I'm on 0.8.1 again, and things seem to be OK for now. (crossing fingers...)
