Lightweight terminal emulator?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2005-09-15, Marius Gedminas <marius at pov.lt> 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).

When I switched to rxvt I was running Linux on a 25 MHz 486
with 8MB of RAM, and on a 20MHz 68020 with 4MB of RAM.  Which
is probably why the thought of a terminal emulator that uses
38MB of RAM is shocking to me.

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

That's next on the list of things to do.

>> 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.

And me along with them.  If we waited for a piece of software
to be ready for prime time before using it, we still be using
Freiden mechanical calculators.

> Midnight Commander is the only UTF-8 unaware app that I
> sometimes want to use ('cause Nautilus doesn't have directory
> compare).

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  Hello, GORRY-O!! I'm
                                  at               a GENIUS from HARVARD!!
                               visi.com