5 ms·

OK, so I tried it out, and have immediately bumped into two things on it, one of which is kind of a show-stopper. The first is kind of a minor nit, but when la

OK, so I tried it out, and have immediately bumped into two things on it, one of which is kind of a show-stopper. The first is kind of a minor nit, but when launching MacTerm for the first time, I get prompted to choose a terminal, and the options don't immediately make sense. Choosing "Shell" at random caused the terminal window to seemingly appear and then disappear; choosing "Log-In Shell" at random did the same thing, until I found it under the File menu ... I think? When re-launching the app, the behavior seems to have changed. At least, I can't get it to do the appear-and-disappear thing now; instead, the first two options just give me a blank window. I much prefer being presented with a ready-to-go terminal session in a window without having to answer any questions first or go searching for the session I just started. But maybe you set it up that way for a good reason and I just don't know it. The show-stopper though is the font rendering. Here's a screenshot of my desktop, with full-screen iTerm2 in the background and MacTerm in the foreground: http://i.imgur.com/5D1z2.png http://i.imgur.com/5D1z2.png I've set up both of those apps to use the same font (Monaco) at the same point size (12), and the rendering looks a lot different. I can stare at iTerm all day and not want to gouge out my eyes afterward; I don't think I could spend much time in MacTerm without hating life. I didn't see an option in the preferences for anti-aliasing; did I miss it? Since a terminal window does nothing but assault the viewer all day with text, doing the text rendering really really well is a great way to make your app stand out. Prepackaging a default mono-spaced font like Consolas or Panic Sans (not likely on that one, but maybe worth a shot?) would help a lot, because Monaco is really not the best font out there for programmers. Stuff I liked right away: I really liked that you include the scroll bar in your full screen mode, but none of the other window chrome. Nice! That's something that iTerm2 gets wrong. I want the scroll bar, but none of the other stuff, in full-screen mode. Hope this helps.

makecheck 15y ago
Thanks for all the comments! The startup behavior might be slightly historical, it used to be a remote-only shell in the Classic Mac days and didn't really have a local shell. Back then there was always something needed (host name, whatever), and technically it is still possible to start sessions that way. But good point...I may change the built-in default. In any case, the startup behavior is controlled by the contents of the Default Workspace (in Preferences -> Workspaces). So you can turn off all windows, or spawn certain windows that contain whatever you want. EDIT: I've identified what caused the "appear and disappear" behavior you described. You can download the latest version from here and it will be fixed: http://macterm.net/updates/daily.html http://macterm.net/updates/daily.html Thanks for the font info. I'm not sure (as a free GPL program) how to package a font, but if I can find one that's compatible and OK to include I probably will. I've even tried Consolas myself. As for the rendering, that is very close to the top of my list and is quite complicated. As I mentioned earlier, the code has its roots in Classic and I'm not relying on modern drawing code completely. That is set to change, but it's slow work. :) Unicode rendering has the same problem; although the buffer and decoder work perfectly, and you can copy/paste/drag/print any Unicode, the terminal can't display every character and it's because the drawing code is too old. I'm glad you like how Full Screen works. Also note there's a bunch of stuff in Preferences that you can tweak for that mode.
- thaumaturgy 15y ago
  I came back here to see if I could figure out the appear-and-disappear problem, and you've already fixed it. Nice work. :-)
  - makecheck 15y ago
    Glad to help. :) Let me know if you need anything else.

makecheck 15y ago

Thanks for all the comments! The startup behavior might be slightly historical, it used to be a remote-only shell in the Classic Mac days and didn't really have a local shell. Back then there was always something needed (host name, whatever), and technically it is still possible to start sessions that way. But good point...I may change the built-in default. In any case, the startup behavior is controlled by the contents of the Default Workspace (in Preferences -> Workspaces). So you can turn off all windows, or spawn certain windows that contain whatever you want. EDIT: I've identified what caused the "appear and disappear" behavior you described. You can download the latest version from here and it will be fixed: http://macterm.net/updates/daily.html http://macterm.net/updates/daily.html Thanks for the font info. I'm not sure (as a free GPL program) how to package a font, but if I can find one that's compatible and OK to include I probably will. I've even tried Consolas myself. As for the rendering, that is very close to the top of my list and is quite complicated. As I mentioned earlier, the code has its roots in Classic and I'm not relying on modern drawing code completely. That is set to change, but it's slow work. :) Unicode rendering has the same problem; although the buffer and decoder work perfectly, and you can copy/paste/drag/print any Unicode, the terminal can't display every character and it's because the drawing code is too old. I'm glad you like how Full Screen works. Also note there's a bunch of stuff in Preferences that you can tweak for that mode.

thaumaturgy 15y ago
I came back here to see if I could figure out the appear-and-disappear problem, and you've already fixed it. Nice work. :-)
- makecheck 15y ago
  Glad to help. :) Let me know if you need anything else.