Lightweight terminal emulator?

[Marius Gedminas]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2005 at 03:05:38AM +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2005-09-15, Michael R Head <burner at suppressingfire.org> wrote:
> >> I've been using aterm (1/10 the size of gnome-terminal) for
> >> many years, but it doesn't have UTF-8 support, so the move to
> >> supporting only UTF8 locales broke aterm.

I once used Linux on a Pentium 75 MHz ThinkPad with 40 megs of RAM.
Memory was precious.  I did some research and discovered that rxvt was
the smallest terminal emulator (and had all the features of aterm).

Later I switched to xterm because I needed UTF-8 support (plus it was
incredibly configurable via its X resources, and I *like* Atherna style
scrollbars).

Then gnome-terminal seduced me because it had tabs.  (Of course, this
happened after I got a better computer.)

I've heard that there's a version of rxvt that supports UTF-8 these
days.  You could try that one.

> > xfce has it's own terminal program that's similar to
> > gnome-terminal but seems to be a bit peppier.  
> 
> Yup.  I've been experimenting with xfce4-terminal. It's not
> nearly as bloated as gnome-terminal, though it's still 4-6
> times larger than aterm.  The proble with xfce4-terminal that
> is as yet unsolved is that I can't convince it to use a decent
> terminal font. By decent, I mean something like the X11 "misc"
> 7x14 bitmapped font.  The scalable rendered fonts are all too
> ugly to look at for 10 hours a day.

You can ask modern Xft2/Pango/fontconfig-using applications to support
the old bitmapped fonts by uncommenting a single line in
/etc/fonts/local.conf.  Or you can let dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig do
that for you.  7x13 at 75 dpi used to be my favourite font.  Fontconfig
calls it 'Fixed'.

> But, ubuntu doesn't appear to have any of the "misc" bitmapped
> fonts in UTF encoding.  They're all there, but they're all
> ISO-8859-1 encoding, but the whole distro is UTF8-only.

Look for the fonts in ISO-10646-1 encoding.  Debian had them for a long
time.  xlsfonts -fn -misc-fixed-*-iso10646-1 shows they're there on my
Ununtu system.

> I'm not sure the "UTF8-only" thing is really ready for
> prime-time.

Maybe, a bit -- but it is past time to drag the old UTF-8-unaware apps
kicking and screaming into the 21st century.  Midnight Commander is the
only UTF-8 unaware app that I sometimes want to use ('cause Nautilus
doesn't have directory compare).

Marius Gedminas
-- 
Windows 98: Not Plug & Play, but Bug & Pay!
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