From: Nicholas Clark Date: 17:14 on 24 Nov 2004 Subject: Apple Terminal Grrr. Not only can't it do xterm quite correctly, but it has this really stupid resizing issue: I have an external display plugged in. The menu bar moves to the display, as I have configured things to be. Because of this, I have room for a 63 row terminal on the laptop display. I unplug the external display. The menu bar returns to the laptop display, as is expected. There's no longer room for a 63 row terminal window, but a 61 would fit. Does terminal resize to a 61 row window? FUCK NO! It resizes to something totally BRAINDEAD. About the smallest size the window manager would let it. 4x4, or that's what it feels like. Chelsea Tractor size. So I have to pull the thing back out to a sensible size. Little pile of shit. And you realise what's so utterly HATEFUL about this? If I minimise the terminal, THEN unplug the external display, then unminimse the terminal, it goes "uh oh, I don't fit!" and NEATLY RESIZES ITSELF TO 61 ROWS. You've just proved that you are capable of the right thing. So why not JUST FUCKING DO IT all the time? Crap. If I wanted this level of stupidity, I'd be using Windows telnet. Let's not go there. Nicholas Clark
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 17:20 on 31 Jul 2006 Subject: Apple Terminal I have the terminal set on ISO-8859-1. If I force it to 70 characters I see the following: $ perl -le 'print "e1 " x 25' e1 e1 e1 e1 e1 e1 e1 e1 e1 e1 e1 e1 e1 e1 e1 e1 e1 e1 e1 e1 e1 e1 e1 e 1 e1 $ perl -le 'print "\xe91 " x 25' é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 é1 WTF? Why is the hateful thing doing some sort of word wrapping whenever the line has a non-ASCII character? Why can't I disable it? Which moron thinks that this is useful behaviour? Where do they live? Can I claim "provocation" as my defence against any charges that might arise? Nicholas Clark
From: Aaron Crane
Date: 18:43 on 31 Jul 2006
Subject: Re: Apple Terminal
Nicholas Clark writes:
> WTF? Why is the hateful thing doing some sort of word wrapping whenever
> the line has a non-ASCII character?
> Why can't I disable it?
Other things to hate about Apple Terminal:
* It has a Preferences dialog which, following the HIGs, can be found b=
y
hitting Command-;. But it puts most prefs not in the Preferences
dialog, but in the crack-fuelled "Terminal > Window Settings..." menu
item.
* It carefully avoids using libc's wcswidth() function to work out the
width of characters. Instead, it has a pref (!) to determine whether
non-ASCII characters are 1 cell or 2. If you set it to 1, fullwidth
Unihan and Kana characters get broken. If you set it to 2, Unihan an=
d
Kana work, but everything else gets broken. This is a neat way of
ensuring that, for example, Mutt will always get its layout screwed w=
hen
you receive foreign-language spam.
* If you have a UK Mac keyboard (on which Shift-3 is =A3, and # is foun=
d on
Option-3), and you sanely set "Use option key as meta key" (so that y=
ou
can type Meta-f and Meta-b without using the Escape key), there's
actually no direct way of typing a # character at all.
In theory, it ought to be possible to tell Terminal that Shift-3 is #=
,
and =A3 is nowhere. In practice, if you try to add a key mapping for
Shift-3, you discover that the 3 key isn't in the _special_ set of ke=
ys
you're allowed to map.
Also in theory, you might be able to make it work by editing
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist in Property List Edito=
r.
But in practice, you need to use some magic hex value to identify the
key gesture you mean. I don't even know where I could look up such a
thing.
In the end, I gave up: to get a # under Terminal, I have to either (a=
)
remember that I mapped it to Option-F3, or (b) copy and paste from
something else.
The lack of a working terminal emulator for Mac OS (no, iTerm doesn't cou=
nt;
nor does anything run under X) is one of the reasons I'm going back to
Linux once I get a new laptop.
--=20
Aaron Crane
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 19:47 on 31 Jul 2006 Subject: Re: Apple Terminal > * If you have a UK Mac keyboard (on which Shift-3 is _, and # is found on > Option-3), and you sanely set "Use option key as meta key" [insert years of hate over the program that leads people to consider this sane] The keyboard remapping tools (or, rather, the lack of them) is a hateful feature of both OS X and Windows. Of course X11 was heading down the same dark path with X11R6 before the coup. > The lack of a working terminal emulator for Mac OS (no, iTerm doesn't count; > nor does anything run under X) is one of the reasons I'm going back to > Linux once I get a new laptop. You don't want to run an X-based terminal on OS X, so you're going to run an X-based terminal under Linux?
From: Jarkko Hietaniemi Date: 19:59 on 31 Jul 2006 Subject: Re: Apple Terminal Peter da Silva wrote: >> * If you have a UK Mac keyboard (on which Shift-3 is _, and # is found on >> Option-3), and you sanely set "Use option key as meta key" > > [insert years of hate over the program that leads people to consider this sane] > > The keyboard remapping tools (or, rather, the lack of them) is a hateful > feature of both OS X and Windows. Of course X11 was heading down the same > dark path with X11R6 before the coup. > >> The lack of a working terminal emulator for Mac OS (no, iTerm doesn't count; >> nor does anything run under X) is one of the reasons I'm going back to >> Linux once I get a new laptop. > > You don't want to run an X-based terminal on OS X, so you're going to run > an X-based terminal under Linux? Indeed. One must wonder how hard it can be to write a simple vtXXX-compatible emulator for Cocoa that would work just like xterm. Of course, these days one would have to implement (at least) UTF-8, too. In the mists of time I wrote a line editor for a Japanese Z80 micro with honest PEEK/POKE style of programming and memory-mapped 40x25 display, but I think the source code is by now quite unreadable in dusty C cassettes...
From: Aaron Crane Date: 20:04 on 31 Jul 2006 Subject: Re: Apple Terminal Peter da Silva writes: > > * If [...] you sanely set "Use option key as meta key" > > [insert years of hate over the program that leads people to consider this > sane] If you like typing two keys when there's a perfectly good modifier available, that's your choice. > > The lack of a working terminal emulator for Mac OS (no, iTerm doesn't > > count; nor does anything run under X) is one of the reasons I'm going > > back to Linux once I get a new laptop. > > You don't want to run an X-based terminal on OS X, so you're going to run > an X-based terminal under Linux? I want to run an X-based terminal (a specific X-based terminal, as it happens) on an OS that supports it natively, without me having to endure the pain of running two desktops on a single screen.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 00:32 on 01 Aug 2006 Subject: Re: Apple Terminal > If you like typing two keys when there's a perfectly good modifier available, > that's your choice. There's plenty of other reasons for hating Emacs than the fact that it makes you type two, three, or even four keys for common operations. But that's a good start. > I want to run an X-based terminal (a specific X-based terminal, as it > happens) on an OS that supports it natively, without me having to endure > the pain of running two desktops on a single screen. [insert hate over "desktops" infecting X11 so badly that this statement makes sense, even in retrospect]
From: Dave Hodgkinson Date: 00:40 on 01 Aug 2006 Subject: Re: Apple Terminal On 1 Aug 2006, at 00:32, Peter da Silva wrote: >> If you like typing two keys when there's a perfectly good modifier >> available, >> that's your choice. > > There's plenty of other reasons for hating Emacs than the fact that > it makes > you type two, three, or even four keys for common operations. But > that's a good > start. Since I got the pedals and the eyebrow gesture tracker, it's been much easier.
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