[Techtalk] rxvt - was: Re: End key no longer goes to EOL

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Sun, Jan 13, 2002 at 11:28:35AM +0100 or thereabouts, Almut Behrens wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 12, 2002 at 04:26:36PM -0600, Glenda R. Snodgrass wrote:
> > > The terminal emulator (xterm, kterm, rxvt or whatever) gets this
> > 
> > Well, I confess, I cheated.  I've been using xterm, so I decided to try
> > rxvt and discovered that my End key goes to EOL like I wanted it to in
...
> I was also quite pleased when I first came across rxvt -- and it's been
> my personal preference ever since. It's just so beautifully light-weight
> and sane (just uses about 300k mem, half of which are shared, compared
> to 1500k for xterm), that even my weaker machines don't mind me opening
> my usual 20-40 terminals.  And who uses these additional graphics
> features that xterm offers, anyway? So far, I haven't seen anyone doing
> tektronix grahics and stuff in xterm...

Oh boy. A good half of gnome-terminal bugs at times seem to be
"xterm does this neat thing. Why doesn't gnome-terminal?" I have
discovered xterm does tons and tons of things now! (Someone kindly
dumped the result of running vttest on gnome-terminal into bugzilla
too. Joy.) The "log to a file" xterm facility is now on my wishlist 
for gnome-terminal too, but I can live without some of the more
obscure features. 

> Well, a properly working terminal plus a personally de-uglified font
> (yes, I went to the trouble of rolling my own, because my eyes didn't
> really like the typical fixed-width fonts available) ... and working
> with text-mode programs can be a real pleasure again :)

I believe there is long historical background to the backspace/delete 
key thing and what each one does or should do; but the reason I never
really got going with rxvt was that in the FAQ for it, it's plain that 
rxvt does it one way, and that I was used to it the other way. Purely 
a personal thing, that. I am not au fait with fonts, and just live
with most of them, which has people who mess with them asking me
"But how can you put up with that?" 

I did play with wterm (same family as rxvt) a lot because I
liked the little menu that popped up and let you change font
sizes and colours and hadn't seen anything like it before.

I went back to gnome-terminal purely because I was used to it,
and I love dingus-clicking. I believe KDE's terminal emulator
(kterm, not to be confused with kterm the kanji one?) also
does this now: when the mouse moves over a URL, the URL becomes
underlined. By control-key-left-clicking, you can open your
preferred browser on that URL. Anything from ftp to http to 
https. It sounds complete fluff and bloat, but I would hate
not to have that now.

(It's called dingus clicking because Nat Friedman hacked it
into rxvt or something like that ages back and called it
"dingus" then. And when it was re-implemented in gnome-terminal,
people who remembered kept calling it dingus-clicking and
the rest of us picked up on it.)

> Okay, I'll stop rambling about stuff nobody has asked for...

Don't do that; I will have to stop too, then!

Telsa