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Occasionally, I have switched back to XTerm on my Linux systems and it’s always been fine. Good performance, good compatibility (everything runs correctly in XT

Occasionally, I have switched back to XTerm on my Linux systems and it’s always been fine. Good performance, good compatibility (everything runs correctly in XTerm), what else do you need? - Tabs - Clickable URLs Otherwise, XTerm is solid. The source code is a bit of a nightmare.

eviks 4y ago
Why settle for otherwise fine (despite so many years of development) when you can use good?
hellcow 4y ago
tmux can handle the tabs.
- klodolph 4y ago
  No, it really can’t. Some people are happy with TMux but it introduces some compatibility problems (TMux itself contains a terminal emulator, and not everything works correctly in TMux), and half the point of tabs is being able to organize them how you please—if you want move a tab to a new window, you can do that.
  - csdvrx 4y ago
    Try tabbed.
  - readme 4y ago
    if you really want a GUI tab, I suppose you're right i'll take the TUI tab with the added bonus of not losing my work when the window is closed any day.
    - klodolph 4y ago
      I have my terminal set up so the window won’t close without prompting. I also like being able to copy-paste things out of terminals, and Tmux makes it a bit difficult. I know how to use the scrollback in Tmux but it’s just so much easier to use the scrollback in a GUI terminal editor.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - hnlmorg 4y ago
        I think what you’re describing is more habitual than the strengths and weaknesses of different solutions. Which is fine but the discussion needs to be framed that way.
        hnlmorg 4y ago
        People disagreeing with me but that fact that we’ve had a dozen people propose a dozen different ways to do the same thing, that alone should be evidence enough that what we are arguing over is personal preference rather than “x can’t do y”. Having been a Linux (and unix before that) user for decades now, I’ve seen people argue over vi vs emacs, KDE vs GNOME, GTK vs Qt, GPL vs BSD and so on and so forth. They make all sorts of well reasoned arguments but it almost always just boils down to personal preference at the end of the day. Yet it’s amazing how many people think that their preferences are unequivocal facts.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
    Tmux has the ability to move a tab to a new tmux session. Also, on X, there’s things like https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/ https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/ which can produce tabbed layouts of arbitrary applications.
    - klodolph 4y ago
      I am not happy with the user experience I get when running multiple tmux sessions. My personal limit is one tmux session per host. Tabbed looks cool, but I don’t see any online documentation.
      - bee_rider 4y ago
        Interesting! I usually have tmux in every terminal. I like that it keeps the session around even if I do something dumb like accidentally close my terminal. It is cool that the ecosystem is flexible enough to fit our basically opposite preferences.
        klodolph 4y ago
        My terminal will stop me from closing the terminal if there’s a program running. I’ve also encountered a few problems with tmux from time to time—certain shortcuts stop working in weird, hard-to-diagnose ways, if a program is being run through tmux, or through some combination of ssh + tmux.
        mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
        Depending on what terminal you use, this is likely to be related to the remote host missing the right termcap files and therefore there's no way for tmux to know how to do certain things. One of the nice things about xterm is this basically never happens.
        bee_rider 4y ago
        One of my systems has that confirmation dialogue enabled, it is pretty annoying IMO, I don’t want to have to reach for my mouse just to close a terminal. (I’ll disable it at some point, it is a system that I mostly just remote in to anyway, so it isn’t a daily annoyance). There’s a shortcut in Vim that my tmux config gets in the way of. Ctrl-a, increment a number. This is a weird shortcut to me, though, actually I’m happy tmux over-writes it!
  - msla 4y ago
    > TMux itself contains a terminal emulator, and not everything works correctly in TMux Which is why we invented terminfo and ncurses.
  - soraminazuki 4y ago
    I think you'll be pleasantly surprised if you look into what tmux is actually capable of. It's extremely customizable, featureful, and well-documented. All of the complaints you've raised in this thread can actually be solved with a bit of configuration. > TMux itself contains a terminal emulator, and not everything works correctly in TMux tmux doesn't merely contain a terminal emulator. Rather, it is a terminal emulator. All terminal emulators have slight differences in behavior and tmux is no exception. But since tmux is actively developed, I haven't personally encountered any deal breaking issues.
    - iforgotpassword 4y ago
      Colleague uses tmux. Every couple months one of his tmux sessions crashes, and he loses everything that ran in it. Meanwhile I can't remember screen ever crashing on me. Don't see why I should ever take that risk.
      - soraminazuki 4y ago
        tmux never crashed on me this past decade either. So unless you're telling me that some computer science breakthrough has made screen crash-proof, I don't see why I should avoid tmux and lose many of the features I rely on.
        iforgotpassword 4y ago
        It's just anecdotal evidence. Maybe it's because he's running arch and gets all the buggy beta versions, I don't know, but other than that, maybe that breakthrough is called "being mostly a finished product that has been around for way longer"?
- colordrops 4y ago
  I'm a constant user of Tmux but the programmatic interface is horrid. My only real complaint.
- tetris11 4y ago
  But it has some of the worst bindings known to man. Scroll the mousewheel or Shift-PageUp? Forget about it.
interroboink 4y ago
I get tabs from my window manager (fluxbox), but not sure if that lacks some magical functionality you might get from it being built-in to the application. I rarely use it though, rather organizing things by whole virtual workspaces instead.
Scarbutt 4y ago
No Text reflow when the terminal is resized. That sounds very annoying.
- bilegeek 4y ago
  It really is until you settle on a larger terminal size by default (I use 100x25 or 100x50 usually, sometimes 132x25/50 for lots of output.) I still miss it though. Don't know why they never added it, for example it's got a whole Tektronix emulator built-in so bloat and extra work are no excuses.
- t-3 4y ago
  Most non-tui programs being run in terminals don't operate that way though, and tui stuff resizes just fine. ps, for example, only outputs text to fill the terminal size and truncates the overflow (which is why it's not safe to grep). Not reflowing makes a lot sense when compared to the complication and bugs reflowing would bring.
  - BenjiWiebe 4y ago
    Tried with SCO OpenServer (old UNIX) and modern Fedora, with Konsole and XTerm. Neither 'ps' in either terminal truncates output to fit the terminal. What 'ps' on what OS did that? Some Googling indicates that on Solaris, 'ps' would default to 80 characters wide before truncating, apparently ignoring the size of the terminal. However even that apparently did not apply when piping; it would output the full line in that case.
    - t-3 3y ago
      After checking, it seems that procps-ng ps doesn't truncate when piped, heirloom ps and plan9 ps never truncate, Net- and OpenBSD ps always truncate.
yepguy 4y ago
You can kind of get clickable links in xterm by configuring it to run a command with the current selection on right-click: *VT100.translations: #override \n\ <Btn3Down>: exec-formatted("xdg-open '%t'", PRIMARY) Now double-click a link to select it, then right-click to open.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
  Nice. I left xterm a couple years ago due to this. High time I went back, I think
  - yepguy 3y ago
    I used to have a script that I bound to right-click instead of xdg-open. In addition to opening URLs, it also extracted the current directory from xterm's title so that I could open files with the mouse as well. I called it plumb (after the Plan 9 tool). Unfortunately I lost the script and am not interested in rewriting it, but maybe it gives you some ideas. You could dispatch any action you want based on patterns in the selection.
austinjp 4y ago
I know precisely zero about X other than being a long-term user. How hard is it to "wrap" xterm in something that provides tabs?
- somat 4y ago
  The funny(ironic) thing is. tabs as a desktop metaphor belong to the window manager.. however tabs, as implemented, were a revolt against window manager tabs. If I understand history correctly, with the meteoric rise in popularity of our modern day terminal(the web browser) people were wanting to run more and more browsers at the same time. as the existing desktop manager state of the art(probably windows 95) was coming up short when dealing with the number of windows people wanted open the browser manufacture Netscape said fine, we will do it our self, this is where my memory gets fuzzy, I forget if it was an early firefox(phoenix anyone) the full mozilla browser or netscape proper(6 ish timeframe) that invented tabs, but they were and still are a very popular way control your many many browser windows you had open. Really in the wrong layer however, it should be your desktop manager that provides tabs, not the application, and some do, but it is not a common thing what with the way DM tabs fight application tabs.
  - vladvasiliu 4y ago
    I remember when Phoenix got tabs, it was a killer feature for me because I was using some environment which didn't handle tabs itself (KDE and Windows). It was great not having to deal with a ridiculous amount of window buttons in the task bar. But now, we've come full circle. I'm using i3 and adore its tabbed windows feature. However, it's basically impossible to disable tabs in current browsers. Firefox has some extensions [0], which combined with some custom css to hide the tab bar kinda sorta work if you're ok with a janky experience. For Chrome, I haven't found anything. [0] I use https://gitlab.com/adsum/firefox-notabs https://gitlab.com/adsum/firefox-notabs
  - mmcgaha 4y ago
    I am not sure that it was first, but Opera was the first browser that I remember having tabs. Outside of browsers, I think UltraEdit was the first application that I remember having tabs.
pmarin 4y ago
https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/ https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/

eviks 4y ago

Why settle for otherwise fine (despite so many years of development) when you can use good?

hellcow 4y ago

tmux can handle the tabs.

klodolph 4y ago
No, it really can’t. Some people are happy with TMux but it introduces some compatibility problems (TMux itself contains a terminal emulator, and not everything works correctly in TMux), and half the point of tabs is being able to organize them how you please—if you want move a tab to a new window, you can do that.
- csdvrx 4y ago
  Try tabbed.
- readme 4y ago
  if you really want a GUI tab, I suppose you're right i'll take the TUI tab with the added bonus of not losing my work when the window is closed any day.
  - klodolph 4y ago
    I have my terminal set up so the window won’t close without prompting. I also like being able to copy-paste things out of terminals, and Tmux makes it a bit difficult. I know how to use the scrollback in Tmux but it’s just so much easier to use the scrollback in a GUI terminal editor.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - hnlmorg 4y ago
      I think what you’re describing is more habitual than the strengths and weaknesses of different solutions. Which is fine but the discussion needs to be framed that way.
      - hnlmorg 4y ago
        People disagreeing with me but that fact that we’ve had a dozen people propose a dozen different ways to do the same thing, that alone should be evidence enough that what we are arguing over is personal preference rather than “x can’t do y”. Having been a Linux (and unix before that) user for decades now, I’ve seen people argue over vi vs emacs, KDE vs GNOME, GTK vs Qt, GPL vs BSD and so on and so forth. They make all sorts of well reasoned arguments but it almost always just boils down to personal preference at the end of the day. Yet it’s amazing how many people think that their preferences are unequivocal facts.
- fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
  Tmux has the ability to move a tab to a new tmux session. Also, on X, there’s things like https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/ https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/ which can produce tabbed layouts of arbitrary applications.
  - klodolph 4y ago
    I am not happy with the user experience I get when running multiple tmux sessions. My personal limit is one tmux session per host. Tabbed looks cool, but I don’t see any online documentation.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      Interesting! I usually have tmux in every terminal. I like that it keeps the session around even if I do something dumb like accidentally close my terminal. It is cool that the ecosystem is flexible enough to fit our basically opposite preferences.
      - klodolph 4y ago
        My terminal will stop me from closing the terminal if there’s a program running. I’ve also encountered a few problems with tmux from time to time—certain shortcuts stop working in weird, hard-to-diagnose ways, if a program is being run through tmux, or through some combination of ssh + tmux.
        mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
        Depending on what terminal you use, this is likely to be related to the remote host missing the right termcap files and therefore there's no way for tmux to know how to do certain things. One of the nice things about xterm is this basically never happens.
        bee_rider 4y ago
        One of my systems has that confirmation dialogue enabled, it is pretty annoying IMO, I don’t want to have to reach for my mouse just to close a terminal. (I’ll disable it at some point, it is a system that I mostly just remote in to anyway, so it isn’t a daily annoyance). There’s a shortcut in Vim that my tmux config gets in the way of. Ctrl-a, increment a number. This is a weird shortcut to me, though, actually I’m happy tmux over-writes it!
- msla 4y ago
  > TMux itself contains a terminal emulator, and not everything works correctly in TMux Which is why we invented terminfo and ncurses.
- soraminazuki 4y ago
  I think you'll be pleasantly surprised if you look into what tmux is actually capable of. It's extremely customizable, featureful, and well-documented. All of the complaints you've raised in this thread can actually be solved with a bit of configuration. > TMux itself contains a terminal emulator, and not everything works correctly in TMux tmux doesn't merely contain a terminal emulator. Rather, it is a terminal emulator. All terminal emulators have slight differences in behavior and tmux is no exception. But since tmux is actively developed, I haven't personally encountered any deal breaking issues.
  - iforgotpassword 4y ago
    Colleague uses tmux. Every couple months one of his tmux sessions crashes, and he loses everything that ran in it. Meanwhile I can't remember screen ever crashing on me. Don't see why I should ever take that risk.
    - soraminazuki 4y ago
      tmux never crashed on me this past decade either. So unless you're telling me that some computer science breakthrough has made screen crash-proof, I don't see why I should avoid tmux and lose many of the features I rely on.
      - iforgotpassword 4y ago
        It's just anecdotal evidence. Maybe it's because he's running arch and gets all the buggy beta versions, I don't know, but other than that, maybe that breakthrough is called "being mostly a finished product that has been around for way longer"?
colordrops 4y ago
I'm a constant user of Tmux but the programmatic interface is horrid. My only real complaint.
tetris11 4y ago
But it has some of the worst bindings known to man. Scroll the mousewheel or Shift-PageUp? Forget about it.

interroboink 4y ago

I get tabs from my window manager (fluxbox), but not sure if that lacks some magical functionality you might get from it being built-in to the application. I rarely use it though, rather organizing things by whole virtual workspaces instead.

Scarbutt 4y ago

No Text reflow when the terminal is resized. That sounds very annoying.

bilegeek 4y ago
It really is until you settle on a larger terminal size by default (I use 100x25 or 100x50 usually, sometimes 132x25/50 for lots of output.) I still miss it though. Don't know why they never added it, for example it's got a whole Tektronix emulator built-in so bloat and extra work are no excuses.
t-3 4y ago
Most non-tui programs being run in terminals don't operate that way though, and tui stuff resizes just fine. ps, for example, only outputs text to fill the terminal size and truncates the overflow (which is why it's not safe to grep). Not reflowing makes a lot sense when compared to the complication and bugs reflowing would bring.
- BenjiWiebe 4y ago
  Tried with SCO OpenServer (old UNIX) and modern Fedora, with Konsole and XTerm. Neither 'ps' in either terminal truncates output to fit the terminal. What 'ps' on what OS did that? Some Googling indicates that on Solaris, 'ps' would default to 80 characters wide before truncating, apparently ignoring the size of the terminal. However even that apparently did not apply when piping; it would output the full line in that case.
  - t-3 3y ago
    After checking, it seems that procps-ng ps doesn't truncate when piped, heirloom ps and plan9 ps never truncate, Net- and OpenBSD ps always truncate.

yepguy 4y ago

You can kind of get clickable links in xterm by configuring it to run a command with the current selection on right-click: *VT100.translations: #override \n\ <Btn3Down>: exec-formatted("xdg-open '%t'", PRIMARY) Now double-click a link to select it, then right-click to open.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
Nice. I left xterm a couple years ago due to this. High time I went back, I think
- yepguy 3y ago
  I used to have a script that I bound to right-click instead of xdg-open. In addition to opening URLs, it also extracted the current directory from xterm's title so that I could open files with the mouse as well. I called it plumb (after the Plan 9 tool). Unfortunately I lost the script and am not interested in rewriting it, but maybe it gives you some ideas. You could dispatch any action you want based on patterns in the selection.

austinjp 4y ago

I know precisely zero about X other than being a long-term user. How hard is it to "wrap" xterm in something that provides tabs?

somat 4y ago
The funny(ironic) thing is. tabs as a desktop metaphor belong to the window manager.. however tabs, as implemented, were a revolt against window manager tabs. If I understand history correctly, with the meteoric rise in popularity of our modern day terminal(the web browser) people were wanting to run more and more browsers at the same time. as the existing desktop manager state of the art(probably windows 95) was coming up short when dealing with the number of windows people wanted open the browser manufacture Netscape said fine, we will do it our self, this is where my memory gets fuzzy, I forget if it was an early firefox(phoenix anyone) the full mozilla browser or netscape proper(6 ish timeframe) that invented tabs, but they were and still are a very popular way control your many many browser windows you had open. Really in the wrong layer however, it should be your desktop manager that provides tabs, not the application, and some do, but it is not a common thing what with the way DM tabs fight application tabs.
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  I remember when Phoenix got tabs, it was a killer feature for me because I was using some environment which didn't handle tabs itself (KDE and Windows). It was great not having to deal with a ridiculous amount of window buttons in the task bar. But now, we've come full circle. I'm using i3 and adore its tabbed windows feature. However, it's basically impossible to disable tabs in current browsers. Firefox has some extensions [0], which combined with some custom css to hide the tab bar kinda sorta work if you're ok with a janky experience. For Chrome, I haven't found anything. [0] I use https://gitlab.com/adsum/firefox-notabs https://gitlab.com/adsum/firefox-notabs
- mmcgaha 4y ago
  I am not sure that it was first, but Opera was the first browser that I remember having tabs. Outside of browsers, I think UltraEdit was the first application that I remember having tabs.

pmarin 4y ago

https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/ https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/